SEO regression. I’ve been talking about this quite recently. What the heck is it?
SEO regression is going backwards with your SEO – losing organic traffic.
Traffic loss comes with traffic growth. You’re not always going to be on the up. Your traffic will fluctuate.
However, when you have a drastic loss in organic traffic, beyond the boundary of normality, you’re probably experiencing a regression in your SEO.
How does this happen…?
Well, the obvious cause of a drastic change in visibility is an algorithm change, or update.
An algo update could shake up the SERPs, change your rankings and leave you with less visibility.
What this equates to is less traffic.
There could also be less volume with the set of keywords you rank for.
We’ve seen this with the pandemic. Some keywords are being searched for less – in the travel industry, for example.
Less volume means less visibility.
What this equates to is less traffic.
And then there is competition response, which every brand concerns with.
You being at number 1 for a highly competitive term means every competitor is looking at you, looking at what you’re doing, looking at what’s being done to and for your site, and aiming to replicate that activity so they can claim that number one spot.
If a brand competitor makes changes to and for their site, and Google suddenly favours them over you, you lose rankings, you lose visibility.
What this equates to is less traffic.
All of these things can and do happen, which can make your SEO regress.
But by far, the most impactful cause of you regressing in your SEO comes from within your business.
It’s self inflicted.
It’s an issue that arises from non-SEOs inadvertently causing your SEO performance to worsen.
It’s an issue that you absolutely must pay attend to – and address.
You see, whilst the goal of SEO is to bring in more traffic (qualified traffic, of course), by improving your site’s performance, there is also a big need to prevent the loss of traffic by avoiding your site being screwed up to the point where its ranking ability is compromised.
By compromising your site’s ranking ability, you regress your SEO.
How do you compromise your site’s ranking ability?
By having a low awareness of SEO within your business.
SEO, you see, is not like other Digital Marketing channels – nooo.
It’s special. Unique.
It’s so unique, its performance can be affected by any and everyone who has a touchpoint with your website.
As such, any and everyone has the ability to impact the performance of the SEO channel.
So it stands to reason then that the more awareness of the channel you have, outside of the channel, the more you increase your site’s ability to rank well, and stay ranking well, in the SERPs.
Unfortunately, the standard approach to SEO is to have and keep it isolated as a channel.
Even worse, is that this approach actually works. And works well.
Until it doesn’t.
And when it doesn’t, it’s too late.
Why is it too late, you may ask?
Simple.
SEOs fix things – issues on a website.
This is the default of SEO. It doesn’t have to be but since its inception it has been.
In order to fix issues on your website, you first have to identify them, right?
This is why audits are typically the first step with SEO.
By the time you identify an SEO issue, it most likely have already been discovered by search bots.
And as such, it’s most likely already impacting the way your site ranks in the SERPs.
This is why SEO is known as a reactive channel.
Your SEOs are constantly reacting to the state of your website.
If the state of your website is shaped by more than SEOs, why would you have it so only SEOs are aware of how your site is performing in the SERPs?
You shouldn’t.
What you should have instead, is an always-on ‘campaign’ (if you like) where the awareness of SEO is spread outside of the SEO department.
Now, let me say, this doesn’t mean every person in your business needs to be an SEO person.
I very much believe that the job of SEO should be carried out by SEOs.
Trying to get non-SEOs to do SEO is a problem in itself – which is a topic for another time.
So you’re not trying to get non-SEOs to do SEO.
You are, however, trying to increase the awareness of SEO so that non-SEOs don’t inadvertently create issues that will negatively impact the performance of the SEO channel.
As I said, SEO, by default, is a reactive channel.
By the time SEOs spot issues, it’s too late. The problem has already happened and SEO now needs to react, and react quickly, to fix it.
And you may have already noticed, fixing SEO issues also requires more than SEOs.
We tend to group SEO issues within the channel’s 3 pillars – on-page, off-page and technical.
This translates to issues that need to be addressed on the site or off the site.
Perhaps the biggest SEO issue can be deemed to be for the site.
This is the issue of a lack of awareness of SEO.
The lack of awareness of SEO, like all other SEO issues, is one to be fixed.
Fixing this issue will take you from a state where you’re reactive with your SEO to a state where you’re proactive with your SEO.
And when you’re proactive with your SEO, you prevent issues from occurring, operating outside of the default where SEO races to perform well only when your site’s ranking ability has been compromised.