MARIE TURNER - Brighton SEO Deck - Help! My Traffic has tanked! (with deck notes).pptx

Deck presented at brightonSEO by Marie Turner, Senior SEO Consultant at GAIN. Covering traffic loss when you don't know what's caused it. Leaning on lateral thinking, a 360 degree view of search to find the issues impacting you the most.

1. thisisgain.com

2. thisisgain.com …SEO IS SLOW. When I came from advertising to SEO about 10 years ago, I realised something: SEO is SLOW. And you’d think that makes things better when it comes to traffic loss and it doesn’t.

3. thisisgain.com Most of the people sitting here are experiencing what is probably a bit of a slow death unless you’ve done something silly like noindex your site, accidentally blocked it from robots, etc. and in that case you’d know what you need to do.

4. thisisgain.com And recovering might be slow, and futile as you try and pull theories out of mid air. And it might feel like rearranging the deck chairs on the titantic when it’s sinking.

5. thisisgain.com but even galaxy class starship captains can recover, slowly and it won’t be easy, but you can, with the right tools, support and mindset.

6. thisisgain.com But things might not be the same as before. Sometimes when you’ve lost traffic like this, it can be almost impossible to recover it in the same way.

7. thisisgain.com Hi, I’m Marie! I’m Marie, I’ve never met a star trek episode I didn’t like

8. thisisgain.com Marketer for 15 years ( ish ?) and SEO for 10.

9. thisisgain.com And I am here to help

10. thisisgain.com What we know

11. thisisgain.com Crawling Indexing Ranking We want to make sure Google can crawl, so it can add our content to the index, and we want to appeal to users of google search.

12. thisisgain.com How do we impact these things? Site architecture Site speed Content quality Linking Authority Javascript Page structure And many more… And all of these things affect us – the levers we can pull in SEO expand from site architecture to off-page activity

13. thisisgain.com When we start to lose traffic, and we have no idea what’s causing it, what do we do?

14. thisisgain.com Tech audit time! Over the last 3 years, I’ve had about 10 sites who have lost traffic like this, and often they’ve been to more than one agency already. And all of these only had a technical audit. I didn’t see a single client with any more than this. What are we doing?

15. thisisgain.com You need to look at the WHOLE SITE Technical audits on their own are a bit pointless when it comes to traffic loss when you have no idea what’s caused it. You need to look at your site multi- factorily . Because as we’ve established, a technical audit on its own won’t resolve everything if the solution wasn’t technical.

16. thisisgain.com Because ALL of these: Site architecture Site speed Content quality Linking Authority Javascript Page structure And many more… ALL of these things affect us. So why do we knee-jerk towards a technical audit when we lose traffic like this?

17. thisisgain.com Your process from now on

18. 1] The site audit 2] Lateral thinking thisisgain.com 3] Take action A proper site audit, that examines everything. Apply your findings with a bit of lateral thinking and how to take action properly so it gets done. How to take those findings and make them cohesive using lateral thinking, and most importantly – taking action and getting them implemented.

19. 1] The site audit thisisgain.com

20. thisisgain.com Crawling issues on-site Indexing issues on-site Content Quality & Positioning 1 2 3 Off-page signals 4 Competitor positioning 5 You are going to look at all of these things & more.

21. thisisgain.com Think EXHAUSTIVELY .

22. thisisgain.com Example: Don’t just think off-page includes links! You’ve got citations, social interactions, GBP, etc, Links are just part of the puzzle for off-page.

23. thisisgain.com Your mindset throughout:

24. thisisgain.com What’s changed?

25. thisisgain.com You’ve got your audit.

26. thisisgain.com You’ve got loads of Screaming Frog/ Sitebulb items

27. thisisgain.com That’s it, right?

28. thisisgain.com Wrong.

29. 2] Lateral Thinking thisisgain.com

30. thisisgain.com What the heck is lateral thinking?

31. thisisgain.com The opposite of lateral thinking is linear thinking, if this helps.

32. thisisgain.com Linear thinking Lateral thinking Linear thinking is essentially, a start and a stop, with measured steps in between that are predictable to a degree. Lateral thinking is finding the solution, but exploring unconventional ways to do it because I bet if you’re here, you’ve done all the conventional steps.

33. thisisgain.com Search engines are not linear

34. thisisgain.com So your solutions shouldn’t be linear

35. thisisgain.com This is what I imagine a non-linear site audit to look like in a concept. It’s a bit like the solar system. Moving parts, some items in are in alignment with others and interact with them despite being in different groups. You may examine one group like Indexing, but it touches crawling, off-page, etc.

36. thisisgain.com Turn loads of separate line issues into distinct solutions by recognising patterns .

37. thisisgain.com Very basic example: Audit of a 200 page website has given us 5 x redirect issue items affecting 100 URLs

38. thisisgain.com = 1 x solution: redirection has gone awry and needs fixing Redirection may have gone awry – you may be using JS redirects that show one status code to google bot and another status code to the user and that’s giving us 404ing URLs instead.

39. thisisgain.com 1. Easier to understand 2. Easier to action All too often audits have verbatim lists of generic issues, when the actual solutions are easier to understand and easier to action.

40. thisisgain.com 4] Take Action This is actually one of the most important things in this whole deck.

41. thisisgain.com “Technical issues are people issues” - Areej Abuali <3

42. thisisgain.com What would Picard, Janeway, Sisko, Pike, Archer, Burnham, Georgiou do?

43. thisisgain.com We present the facts.

44. thisisgain.com That’s it.

45. thisisgain.com I think we need to [insert action here] When you start to ticket-up your items, use this template as an example by backing up what you need to get done with facts

46. thisisgain.com …because [your evidence-based reasoning here] .

47. thisisgain.com If we do [insert thing here]

48. thisisgain.com … [insert the desired result here] .

49. thisisgain.com “I think we need to re-think the faceted navigation on the site. In our analysis, we found that many category URLs are duplicated due to the way the faceted navigation system functions. If we add a rule-based system for the faceted navigation, we’ll see less duplicate content that’s losing us traffic & revenue .” Altogether, it looks like this. And then you can ticket up the issue in Jira, etc.

50. thisisgain.com I think we need to [insert action here] All they’ll hear is “We’ll aim for the result, great! And our expectations are set on how to get there.”

51. 1] Explore all avenues 2] Don’t think linear thisisgain.com 3] Evidencebased comms

52. thisisgain.com Remember earlier:

53. thisisgain.com I mentioned before things might not be the same again – and I showed you post-borg flashback picard

54. thisisgain.com Hard truth

55. thisisgain.com Sometimes your site won’t recover everything back

56. thisisgain.com My favourite quote from Star Trek: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose, that is not a weakness, that is life”. Because sometimes that traffic has gone, and it’s impossible to get it back in the same way it was before.

57. thisisgain.com Thank you!

58. thisisgain.com

59. thisisgain.com