I recently had to call in an expert to repair a busted garage door at my home, which got me thinking about the value of expertise, especially when it comes to search engine marketing. We tend to think that most problems can be fixed by ourselves or that we can hire a generalist to fix anything. However I didn’t have the time or knowledge to do it myself and the generalist I considered conceded that he didn’t know how to fix it either. So ultimately I had to call in the expert. The same thinking often applies to SEO. You can handle SEO in-house or you can take the “hope and pray” approach, where you basically hope that your web developer took SEO into account in designing your site, and pray that Google can understand the keywords that reflect your business. Yet, calling the “SEO Expert” will help you navigate the search pitfalls more quickly and efficiently. They will help you navigate potentially complex issues such as URL structure, search friendly navigation, canonicalization and site speed.
A good example of this is a client we recently helped navigate a potentially disastrous incident with Google. This client saw their organic traffic from that engine “tank”, practically overnight. This client called frantically, not sure exactly what had caused the problem. An initial assessment suggested that the site had not been banned, as there were dozens of competitive keyword queries that they continued to rank for, but a large number of their news stories no longer ranked, and some of them didn’t even appear in the search results. This suggested that something was inhibiting the ability of Googlebot to crawl and index their pages in a timely manner. After deep digging through their analytics data, their Google webmaster account (which we had set up previously) and attempting to simulate the crawl of their site, we uncovered the “perfect storm.” The client had upgraded their CMS without having upgraded their server capacity. This had slowed down their server load time significantly. The changes had also exposed an underlying URL canonicalization problem which potentially was giving the crawlers mixed signals and diluting both PageRank and inbound link juice. All of this was compounded by the final rollout of the Caffeine Algorithm by Google. The end result was that Googlebot could not crawl a significant portion of the sites content in timely fashion, and also assumed that the content loaded extremely slowly which reduced rankings for any content they could locate. After several days and major backend fixes by the client, our assessment proved to be correct as their organic traffic returned to previous levels.
Many companies assume they can easily navigate the SEO maze. However, if they are only looking top level at title tags, Meta tags, content and links, you are leaving yourself open to problems in the future. More and more content is being indexed by the crawlers and the consolidation of search between 2 players (Google and Bing) make it that much more competitive to rank on the first page. The search engines are tightening up their rules regarding URL canonicalization, page speed and download time. They are offering tools such as Google and Bing webmaster, but by themselves these aren’t the easiest tools to understand. Most businesses don’t have the time to read up on URL structure or inbound link techniques. If you are launching a new site or want to get more organic traffic from an existing site, the least you can do is make sure you have your SEO expert on speed dial. You never know when you might need to make that call.
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