How to Restore Your SEO Success After Site Neglect

In the world of business, it’s easy to let your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts fall to the wayside. Fortunately, fixing your SEO issues is a lot like hopping back on a bicycle after a few years away. Sure, getting back to smooth sailing may take some time, but it’s possible. Let’s dive into the importance of restoring your SEO and how you can effectively do it in 2022.

Why Would a Business Neglect Its Site’s SEO?

While it’s possible, we like to believe that no business owner really intends to abandon the SEO efforts they’ve built up over the years. However, it does happen and some of the most common reasons for neglected sites are:

• Slower business and more focus on in-house operations
• Improved business performance and complacency
• Management parted ways with its SEO team and doesn’t know how to keep up with the evolving demands of search engines

Is it Important to Get Back into Google’s Good Graces?

There are several reasons why SEO can fall into neglect. Regardless, you must get your SEO back in shape as soon as possible. Without successful SEO:

• Your business will lose sight of its audience’s needs
• Your site will lose engagement
• Your competitors will snatch up potential customers
• Your outdated content will become stale and Google will stop ranking you as a relevant, authoritative site

How to Improve Your SEO After Neglect

Letting your site’s SEO go can be devastating for your business’s bottom line. Yet, as unforgiving as neglecting SEO is, restoring your site’s SEO is entirely possible! While it may seem like you’re starting from ground zero, the following steps are essential to making successful SEO a possibility once again.

Get Reacquainted With Your Target Audience

If you’ve let your SEO dry out, the chances are that you’ve had tunnel vision on one aspect of your business and genuinely don’t know what your current audience needs from your brand. Take some time to perform audience research and once again, get to know the people that you want walking through your doors or filling up your online shopping cart. Some of the best ways to get back into the audience mindset include the following:

• Look at the competitors that outrank you and find out what areas of the industry they’ve focused on.
• Check your and industry social media pages and find out what audiences in your industry are curious about, asking for, or looking to change. Your goal is to be a problem solver, and getting to the source like this is one of your biggest advantages.
• Communicate with your audience on social media or through recent reviews. This will give you a direct connection to local audience interests and help you uncover search intent and potential keywords of focus.
• Attend industry events and webinars to ensure your brand is delivering the latest your industry has to offer.

Find Out What Pages Are Getting the Most Engagement

Take a look at your site’s page traffic through Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Each of these tools gives you a bird’s eye view of what pages are getting the most traffic and which are getting zero engagement at all. Not only does this show you where to start making on-site improvements, but it also indicates which pages and blog posts audiences are currently engaged with. This is also essential information because it can help you build a content roadmap that gives your audience what it wants and potentially places you back in a position of industry authority on search engines.

Renew Your Keyword Research Efforts

If you’ve been out of the SEO game for a while, the keywords that you aimed for in the past may not be what your industry focuses on today. Keyword focus can shift every few months. So, staying on top of keywords is essential when repairing your SEO. Fortunately, SEO tools like SEMRush and Google Analytics can help you determine the keywords you need to aim for. From there, you can create a keyword list based on relevance. This list is crucial to the types of updates you’ll need to make on your site and what direction your new content needs to go.

Run a Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audits let business owners know where their site is successful and where it needs improvement. You may think that your site looks great and provides the ultimate user experience. However, you could have many technical issues plaguing your site after you’ve failed to keep up with SEO. Some of the most common problems you’ll find after running a technical audit are:

• Images that aren’t optimized and search-friendly
• Poor site structure
• Poor site navigation
• Slow site loads
• Broken links
• Bad link building
• Duplicate content
• A site that isn’t mobile-friendly, and more!

Running a technical audit can uncover many hidden pitfalls within your site. Once you find them, you’ll be able to take the first steps towards improving your user experience.

Make an Improvement Plan

Deciding to improve your SEO doesn’t mean you’ll fix your SEO issues overnight. Just like building up your rankings took time in the past, it will take equal or even more time to rebuild what you’ve lost. The key to creating an improvement plan that works is consistency and time management. We suggest starting by deciding how many hours per day you can dedicate to your SEO repairs. Whether it’s 1 hour or 4, putting consistent effort into your SEO will eventually lead to progress. Alternate the tasks you assign yourself between

• Keyword research
• Optimizing pages that need improvement
• Updating well-performing pages
• Working on technical updates that improve your site’s performance
• General SEO update research

Remember, SEO is something that is ever-evolving. So, even when you’ve restored your site to its former glory, keep dedicating that allotted time each day to ensure your site is always up-to-date with the latest SEO practices.

Get Back on Track Today, With Dallas SEO Dogs

If you’ve let your SEO efforts dry out, your site likely needs an SEO facelift. If you don’t have the time to dedicate to fixing your SEO, it’s time to call in the experts. At Dallas SEO Dogs, our team focuses on revitalizing the SEO of each of our clients. Through original content creation, backend updates, and constant technical supervision, we can help your site restore its position as a site of authority. Contact us today to learn more about our services and schedule your free SEO consultation with a member of our team.