Every website is under constant pressure to produce. Even well-established businesses have monthly/quarterly/annual quotas they are supposed to meet in terms of visitor growth, qualified leads, sales and so forth. And while I can understand the fear that grips the heart of every site owner and marketer during a slow month, one of the worst mistakes you could make is to cut your SEO when business is slow. Making quick SEO decisions based on one month’s worth (or even worse, a few days!) of data is not smart SEO. Remember—SEO is a long term process, there will be months that aren’t as great as others, but that doesn’t mean you should panic at the first rumblings of trouble.
I always tell my clients that they need to make SEO decisions based on real trends, not the daily spikes and dips that are just a part of the online marketplace. In my opinion, a real trend will emerge over the course of at least 3 months.
It’s important to remember that the search engines are always coming out with updates to their algorithms (Google pushed over 100 updates in March and April), and every time one of those updates hit the SERPs have to rearrange themselves. A strong, white hat site should be able to ride out the updates with no problems, but that doesn’t mean you might not see slight changes in your visitor reports or ranking reports from day to day as the dust settles. When a major update comes down the pipeline (like Panda or Penguin), sites might see even bigger changes (hopefully for the positive) as it works its way around the web. The only time I would say a site shouldn’t wait for trending data is if their site takes a massive nose dive (losing 50% of their traffic overnight for instance) on a day that corresponds with a major search engine update. This is a pretty clear indication that your site was hit with a penalty and you need to start taking the necessary steps to recover now.
Why is it so important to make SEO decision based on trending data? Because it gives you a much better picture of what is going on. For instance, if you compared two years worth of data back-to-back and noticed that the same three months in each year were “slow months,” then you can be fairly confident that seasonality was at fault and there was nothing your SEO campaign could do about it anyway. Those slow months are just a part of your natural business cycle. Had you jumped to conclusions in month one and made rash SEO decisions (like redoing your keyword research and rewriting your site’s content) you would have actually undermined the long term success of your campaign.
Whenever you make major changes to your onsite SEO, you have to wait for your site to be reindexed by the search engines before those changes really mean anything online. It might take a few days, weeks or even months before the search engines get around to recrawling your site. In that downtime your SEO campaign will have suffered because you stopped and switched directions based on inconclusive data.
by Nick Stamoulis
http://www.brickmarketing.com/
I always tell my clients that they need to make SEO decisions based on real trends, not the daily spikes and dips that are just a part of the online marketplace. In my opinion, a real trend will emerge over the course of at least 3 months.
It’s important to remember that the search engines are always coming out with updates to their algorithms (Google pushed over 100 updates in March and April), and every time one of those updates hit the SERPs have to rearrange themselves. A strong, white hat site should be able to ride out the updates with no problems, but that doesn’t mean you might not see slight changes in your visitor reports or ranking reports from day to day as the dust settles. When a major update comes down the pipeline (like Panda or Penguin), sites might see even bigger changes (hopefully for the positive) as it works its way around the web. The only time I would say a site shouldn’t wait for trending data is if their site takes a massive nose dive (losing 50% of their traffic overnight for instance) on a day that corresponds with a major search engine update. This is a pretty clear indication that your site was hit with a penalty and you need to start taking the necessary steps to recover now.
Why is it so important to make SEO decision based on trending data? Because it gives you a much better picture of what is going on. For instance, if you compared two years worth of data back-to-back and noticed that the same three months in each year were “slow months,” then you can be fairly confident that seasonality was at fault and there was nothing your SEO campaign could do about it anyway. Those slow months are just a part of your natural business cycle. Had you jumped to conclusions in month one and made rash SEO decisions (like redoing your keyword research and rewriting your site’s content) you would have actually undermined the long term success of your campaign.
Whenever you make major changes to your onsite SEO, you have to wait for your site to be reindexed by the search engines before those changes really mean anything online. It might take a few days, weeks or even months before the search engines get around to recrawling your site. In that downtime your SEO campaign will have suffered because you stopped and switched directions based on inconclusive data.
by Nick Stamoulis
http://www.brickmarketing.com/
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου