Is it better to revolutionise SEO in your organisation rather than to evolve it?
Let’s get in to this.
When I say ‘revolutionise SEO’, I’m talking about having a radical change of your SEO – emphasis on the term ‘your SEO’.
You see, SEO is SEO.
However, the state of your SEO may be different from the industry standard approach to SEO.
It’s industry standard to have a CMS that automatically generates an XML sitemap.
It’s industry standard to review your log files – from an SEO point of view.
It’s industry standard to ensure that different departments have a basic level of understanding of SEO.
However, the reality, as I’m sure you’re aware, is that your SEO may not be at the point where you have these things in place.
Notice, the things I’ve mentioned are all based on internal changes.
In order to realise an industry-standard approach to SEO, you’ve got to create changes internally.
Why internally?
For this simple reason:
In order to have your website optimised – at its highest level – your internal team must be optimised, first.
This is to say, the better you have SEO working with other departments, the more streamlined this is, the better the state of SEO will be, which in-turn will improve the state of your website.
And of course, this is what SEO is all about, right – Improving the state of your website as to gain more visibility in the SERPs in order to attain more traffic.
Now, when it comes to optimising the state of your SEO, you can go about this in a radical manner, gutting it and starting from ground zero.
Or, you could adopt an approach that’s designed to make small and frequent improvements – i.e. evolve the state of SEO.
Using an evolutionary approach, tends to be the norm, and the default.
In many cases, this works fine.
Making small improvements to your website is safe but slow.
You’ll attain an increase in visibility, in a steady manner, but don’t expect to see improvements quickly.
What this looks like internally is SEO progressively working with departments to change aspects of the website.
These changes will typically be around on-page, off-page and technical elements of your site’s SEO.
You can have this evolutionary approach forever, and it’ll work well for you.
The times where this approach would not work so well is when a bigger change to your site is needed.
One example of this is when you have a site migration.
This is such a big change on your site, for your site, that it really is you revolutionising your SEO.
This is why all types of migrations requires SEO to be engaged with – and not just towards the end of the project but at the beginning of it, and throughout the project.
This is for the sake of having a successful migration, right?
The inverse, is the revolutionary change, leads to less visibility in organic search.
Another example where you may need a revolutionary approach to your SEO is when the state of your SEO leads to it being regressed.
If you find that your departments are causing problems for SEOs, if you find that your SEOs are constantly firefighting to fix issues, if you find that SEOs are busy working with a variety of departments trying to prevent them from causing search performance problems, you may find that you need to revolutionise the state of your SEO.
Internally, revolutionising your SEO requires an immediate knowledge-sharing process to be enacted.
This is where the awareness of SEO, for non-SEOs, need to be worked on, asap.
Assuming internal issues have caused visibility issues for your website, enacting many, and/or big, changes to, and for your website, will lead to visibility changes that are on the up side.
A revolutionary approach leads to site changes, which leads to SERP changes, which is high risk if you’re already stable high up in the SERPs.
This is why careful planning is required if you find yourself at a point where you’re revolutionising your SEO.
To use the example of a migration again, if you do not plan efficiently, you run the risk of doing damage to your search visibility.
This is true for all SEO work that takes on a revolutionary approach.
So whilst this may work well if you’re down in rankings and have a strategy to turn things around, you’re far better off evolving your SEO, as your standard approach.
If you’re executing best practices SEO, incremental improvements will work fine.
If you’re unable to execute best practices recommendations, this most likely means you’re falling behind the industry standards.
This will most likely call for the need to revolutionise your SEO.
This equates to spending more on SEO, for SEO.
If you have CMS limitations and they require an infrastructural update, this is something you have to invest in.
Not something you could invest in, something you have to invest in.
Why is this a must-have, you ask?
Simple.
The element of competition means that at some point you must operate at the industry standard level if you want to perform well in the SERPs.
The quicker you arrive at this reality, the better your website can perform in the SERPs.
The cost of having and running a website is higher now than it was 10 years ago.
In ten years time, the cost will be higher than it is now.
This is just what it is.
If you want a digital presence with a website, you have to accept this.
If the state of your SEO is at the same level of the industry standard – great!
If it is not, you may need to revolutionise your SEO.
