Declining SEO? Look for Underlying Issues
Categorized in: B2B Digital Marketing, SEO
When it comes to SEO, its effectiveness goes through stages. The stages depend on a few factors, such as implementation, the industry, your sales cycle, and even how well the search engines perceive your site. No matter what all these factors, there will come a point when your SEO results will reach their peak… and then they may start to decline.
There are several reasons for this decline, including industry patterns and how effective you’ve been at keeping up with the ongoing SEO tasks. However, if the declines are noticeable, it makes sense to examine other factors. SEO’s decline may have nothing to do with the SEO itself. It could be something else. Here are some examples of what we mean:
Decrease in Audience Perception of Your Brand
As with most things that have to do with digital marketing, SEO and brand awareness are linked. How is your brand being perceived by your audience? If your SEO is declining, this could be indicative of a stale brand. How do people perceive your brand?
Declining SEO could be a strong clue that the brand is declining in the eyes of your audience. There’s something about it that is no longer fresh. People aren’t receiving your messaging well, and for whatever reason, seeing your brand come up in search results doesn’t compel them to click. Indirectly, this could have a negative impact on SEO.
Other pieces of data that could show that your brand is declining include declining market share, an outdated look and feel relative to your industry of your brand’s collateral, and an increase in negative customer feedback.
Outdated Website Decreasing Results
When a website launches, we don’t often think of the future. We believe that the website will always be fine. Yet, years may pass and your website still says the same – same look and feel, same back end. Meanwhile, the world could have moved on. New versions of the backend software launch, your industry changes, your audience could have different ideas of what they expect from your website.
All of these could be factors impacting your SEO. Something simple as a conversion element on your website in a place that is no longer effective, or an outdated backend that is slowing the site down, can all be contributing factors in your decreasing SEO. If your results are declining, you should do a fresh technical and on page SEO audit in order to gain clarity on what might be going on.
Circumstances Outside Your Control
Before you really take a deep dive into this issue, you also need to consider that circumstances outside of your control could be causing a decline in your SEO. These include:
- Economy. If the economy has slowed, depending on your industry, this could be a factor in declining SEO since the two are often related.
- Industry. What is the state of your industry? Are things shifting? Have you stayed current with changes?
- Algorithm. There could have been algorithm changes that impacted you, and you might not realize it.
As you can see, there are several reasons why your SEO results could be declining. Consider the reason before you make changes to your B2B SEO strategy.
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