So, you know SEO is a unique channel, right?
It’s not like any of the other channels – no, no.
It’s special.
Yes, I’m slightly biased cause I’m an SEO guy.
But it’s a unique channel to invest in.
Unfortunately, many businesses treat SEO as all of the other digital marketing channels.
This is until they get to know the channel a lot more.
If there is one thing you should know about the SEO channel –
If there is one intel that will save you countless hours of frustration, countless crash-and-burn type of relationship with suppliers, countless, headaching, misunderstanding of the channel, it’s this –
SEO is a channel that can be impacted by everyone that has an influence on your website.
Here’s what I mean by this statement.
Your visibility in organic search starts with your website being crawled, right?
If your pages are not crawled, your pages are not ranked. Simple.
How often are pages crawled?
Frequently, right?
Let’s say once a day.
Now, there are several factors that determine this but let’s say, on average, your pages are crawled daily.
In most cases, your pages are crawled, and as there aren’t drastic changes to them, your rankings, your visibility, remains relatively stable.
What happens when there are major changes on your pages?
What happens when you’ve added more content onto pages?
What happens when you have more components on pages?
What happens when your pages are not accessible?
You see what I’m getting at, right?
A change on pages, and in fact, a change for pages, brings about the need for search engines to reconsider your rankings when they crawl those pages.
Well, this is the point of SEO, you may say.
It is the point of SEO – when you purposefully want to increase your rankings by optimising the pages that you want to gain more visibility for.
However, what if there are changes on your site that are inadvertent changes? Changes you’ve not planned for, changes you have not accounted for?
What happens, let’s say, if a key page has had minor updates to it, and is republished with a noindex tag on it?
A crawl is attempted on the page and with it not being accessible is removed from indexation.
In other words, the visibility this page once had, in the SERPs, is now gone.
What if this page ranked number 1 for several keywords?
The page is replaced with another page. And the page that replaces it does not have to be from your site.
Actuality, it’s likely to be replaced with a page from another site, a competitor site – at least an online competitor.
This change will happen quickly. Trying to reattain the number 1 position, may not.
It likely will not be quickly, especially if it had been a while since the change happened.
Also, what happens, let’s say, if your partnerships team have landed a new ad deal, and this requires an ads script that’s implemented across the site, which slows down the entire site.
You may be aware that page speed affects rankings but is the Dev person who implements work on the site aware of this? Or are they overwhelmed with ticket items and aim to get through them as quickly as possible?
Everyone can impact the organic visibility of your website.
You can break down ‘everyone’ into 3 groups:
- People within your organisation
- Search engine changes, like algorithm updates
- Competitors – both brand and online competitors
Each group is important.
Unfortunately, many businesses focus far too much on the latter two and far too little on the first group.
The biggest influence on the organic performance of your website should come from within your organisation.
Actually, it does come from within your organisation.
The problem is it’s an unconscious influence.
It’s an influence where the impact on organic is not considered until there is an issue with the channel.
And at that point, of course, it’s too late.
The damage has already been done.
And with SEO, damage can be done quickly but rectifying it can take a very long time.
I’m talking days, weeks, months and even years.
Is it really worth it to have Web Editors who make changes to pages on a daily basis without (at least) a basic understanding of SEO, when an issue that arises from their daily work can take months to rectify – from an SEO point of view?
It’s not. It’s really not.
You have the largest influence on your SEO performance, not your competitors, not algorithm changes from Google.
This influence can be a negative one.
Or it can be a positive one.
Making it a positive one is very simple.
Simply spread the awareness of SEO throughout your organisation.
Everyone in your organisation can impact the organic visibility of your website.
If everyone, within your business, is unaware of how their role can impact rankings, this is an issue you’ve got to rectify.
Organisations – that have a digital presence – are now aware that they need to promote an SEO-first mindset when running their websites.
How is this agenda going in your organisation?
