What should you care about SEO?

The challenge of SEO is to develop your business by addressing your target on the 1st search engine (Google). Monitoring the SEO of your website is therefore vital to make the necessary changes to develop your business. Here are eight elements of SEO that you should focus on.

1. Track your ranking

One of the main goals of SEO -search engine optimization- is to position your site on the first page of search engines. Quite logically, one of the SEO indicators to be monitored regularly concerns the evolution of the ranking of your pages for your targeted keywords.

2. Organic visits and traffic share

As for ranking monitoring, the volume of organic visits is a key performance indicator in SEO. Monitoring the volume of organic visits and the share of traffic from search engines allows you to identify:

• The pages that bring you the most organic traffic;
• The pages you should optimize.

By having a structured SEO strategy, you will inevitably see your share of organic traffic increase.

3. Mobile loading time.

Google value the performance of your site on a cell phone to rank your web pages. For example, for some time now, if you launch a new site, it is automatically added to the Mobile-First Index. It is therefore important to have a site that is adapted to a mobile device:

• From an ergonomic point of view,
• Or loading speed.

Good news: Google Search Console notifies you of problems its crawlers encounter on your website.

4. The bounce rate and the visit duration

You are very well positioned on a strategic keyword for your activity: Congratulation! However, you note that this page has a high bounce rate and/or a low visit duration.

It is possible that:

• The content is not adapted to the users’ search intentions,
• Your internal network does not encourage them to browse other pages of your site,
• The loading time of the site is too high,
• A page is not user friendly…

Monitoring and analyzing these two indicators is very useful to identify the pages to be optimized.

5. Page indexing

You have been working hard for several months to publish content on a regular basis.

After a quick visit to your Search Console, you notice with horror that not all your pages are indexed.

This may be due to a crash in your robots.txt file.

To identify these potential problems, check this indexing indicator regularly. Also, not all pages are necessarily intended to be indexed. If you use tags on your corporate blog, chances are that this will create duplicate content and low-quality pages at the same time. By tracking your indexing, you identify potential problems and can de-index worthless pages.

6. Referring domains and backlinks

The quality of your backlinks is an important factor for your SEO. It helps Google to consider your website as a trusted and authoritative site.

In backlink, most SEOs agree that quality is better than quantity. Indeed, not all backlinks are beneficial to SEO.

Thus, to follow your backlinks:

• Check the quality of your backlinks (spam score, language, topics, …)
• Check your link attribute (No follow/Do-follow),
• Monitor your potential loss of referrer domains.

7. The impact of your content.

If you have already defined a publication strategy and have already communicated, it is time to analyze the results and understand Internet users’ needs and demands. It is important to show empathy and compassion for your audience in times of crisis. Some companies have completely revised their communication policy, and in order not to offend their audience, they have adapted their voice tone to be more reassuring and make fewer references to gatherings and physical contact.

As online research is an indicator of customer intent, SEO managers need to be more aware of consumer sensitivities. This is valuable information that SEO managers should share with other marketers in their organization.

During this period, SEO is more than technical SEO: it is also about being the customer’s voice throughout the organization. Focus on short term adaptation to give you a chance to build long-term brand equity.

8. Duplicate Content

Today, making too much duplicate content is punished by search engines. Google, in particular, has come up with a specific algorithm that acts to filter good and bad content: Google Panda. This is grafted into the indexing process and analyses your pages to check that they are of good quality, that they are not stolen, and at the same time… that they are not duplicated. In other words, if Google Panda, while scanning your site, realizes that you have an endless number of copied and pasted pages, it will punish you. You could lose places or even, in rare cases, be expelled from the index for spam. Another penalty at Google is the manual penalty. In Google Webmaster tools, you can be notified that a penalty for Duplicate content has been registered against you. This penalty can be partial or total. There is, of course, a psychological penalty for your users. If they realize that your site is a duplicate content factory, they will ignore you and give you a bad reputation. Clearly, you won’t see these users as often, they will get lost in the meanders of meaningless and repetitive content.

Solution: Using crawlers such as Screaming Frog, check that you do not have pages with too similar content and titles.