Search engine optimization (SEO) can sometimes be a fickle game. You might have experienced early, exciting results, but after several months of continuing to invest in this strategy, you might lose your momentum.
What exactly should you do if your SEO strategy loses momentum? And how should you adapt in the future?
Analyze the Potential Issues
You probably won’t be able to fix the issues with your SEO strategy unless you know what those issues are. Only by analyzing these hiccups and shortfalls will you be able to identify opportunities for improvement, areas of waste, and missing pieces that you need to succeed.
Unfortunately, many SEO teams struggle with this aspect. After all, if you knew exactly what was wrong with your campaign, you probably wouldn’t have chosen to pursue that strategy in the first place. That’s why it’s often a good idea to work with an outside third party to audit your current efforts and provide some perspective on what’s going wrong and why.
For example, you might choose to hire a fractional CMO from a fractional CMO company. A fractional CMO is a marketing expert with years, if not decades, of experience whom you can hire on a short-term or consulting basis. They can dig into your analytics, analyze your high-level SEO strategy, and give you guidance on any potential issues that you’re facing.
These are some of the main areas that you’ll want to examine:
- High-level strategy/targeting. There could be a problem with your high-level strategy or keyword targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong people, if you’re exposing yourself to too much competition, or if you’re vying for keywords that aren’t strategically valuable, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
- Content quality. What is the quality level of the content you create for your SEO strategy? Content is the foundation of any modern SEO strategy, so if it isn’t pulling its weight, no amount of other SEO work is going to be able to save you.
- Onsite technical SEO issues. Your slowed momentum may be attributable to onsite technical SEO issues. Are you confident that your website loads quickly and efficiently for all users? Are there any ways that you could make it perform even better?
- Bad backlinks. You already know that backlinks are essential to continue increasing your authority and ranking higher in search engines. However, not all backlinks are good for your SEO strategy. If you have too many backlinks that are low authority or irrelevant to your niche, it’s going to compromise your results.
- Insufficient backlinks. You could also fall behind simply because you don’t have enough quality backlinks to support your strategy. Fortunately, this is usually an easy issue to solve.
- Stiff competition. It’s not easy to be competitive in the modern SEO landscape, as there are likely thousands of businesses like yours competing for the same keywords and phrases. You need to be strategic about your competitive battles.
From there, you can start taking action to restore the momentum of your SEO strategy.
Cut the Waste
Pay attention to strategies and tactics that weren’t correlated with any meaningful results. These are forms of wasted time and money. Although no business likes to waste time or money, it’s valuable to pinpoint this waste so you can eliminate it and instantly make your efforts more efficient.
Increase Spending on Viable Tactics
Conversely, it’s a good idea to increase spending on the tactics that seem to be working in your favor. Which publication opportunities have yielded the most value? Which types of content have gotten the most views and engagements? Some processes led you to see success in these areas, so what are they, and how can you double down on them?
Experiment Aggressively
At the heart of SEO is experimentation. It’s not always clear how Google considers or ranks content, and there are no objective formulas for success that can be followed universally. Instead, you’ll be in a better position to rise in search rankings if you conduct your experiments, playing with different variables, and pay close attention to the results.
Remain Patient
SEO is all about the long term. Cutting spending on waste, increasing spending on effective tactics, and experimenting are all going to help you, but they aren’t going to put you at rank one overnight. Accordingly, you need to remain consistent and patient as you work to rebuild the momentum of your SEO strategy.
Unfortunately, SEO is sometimes hard to predict concretely. It may feel like you’re doing everything correctly, but the results might not align with that. As long as you’re willing to conduct a thorough audit of your efforts, and as long as you’re willing to continue adapting, you can correct even those pesky, invisible issues and ultimately start ranking higher in search engines.
