Is your site ready to run the SEO Marathon?

Now I don’t claim to be a runner – in fact the closest thing to a marathon I’ve completed was 24 hours of watching the series 24. I don’t think sitting in a lay-z-boy eating Cheetos and drinking Mountain Dew is going to help me train for 26.2 miles of grueling pain. With that said I have had friends and family members around me that have trained for marathons. I have seen them dedicate hours of their life to the most-intense physical training over a several month period, to try and be even remotely ready for the  amount of physical abuse their body will take.

SEO is Like Training for a Marathon?

I liken these training experiences to that of the SEO preparation for major search engine updates in 2015 and beyond. Any business with a major online presence, should be readying their websites for algorithm changes and updates from Google, Bing and Yahoo. We’ve already seen from Google that they have been doing more continuous rollouts instead of it just being a few day process. This means that any number of drops in traffic from our Analytics reporting could be the same algorithm update over a several month period of time. This is making it increasingly harder to pinpoint changes that Webmasters and SEO’s need to make in order to get back in good graces with the search engines. If we are able to take the marathon training approach, and prepare our websites for the inevitable updates that are to come, we will be ready to take those updates by the horns, and won’t have to worry about it affecting the bottom line of the business.

 SEO Marathon Training Program

A simple guide I put together for this, is my SEO marathon training program:

• Month 1: Have an SEO site audit done if you have not had one recently
• Month 2: implement changes of findings from SEO audit
• Month 3: How does my site rank in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool? Is my site mobile-friendly and are my customers having the best possible experience on my site? Make sites adjustments and changes as needed. (Most likely this will be part of the SEO site audit, but this can take time to implement if major changes are needed)
• Month 4: Do a link analysis/audit and work through the link cleanup and disavow process as needed.
• Month 5: Make sure that the content on my main pages apply to the QUART system that Alan Bleiweiss has so graciously coined for us.
  • Quality
  • Uniqueness
  • Authority
  • Relevance
  • Trust
• Month 6: Evaluate your site compared to your competitors and make changes that will put you ahead of the game.

At the point month 7 rolls around, your site should be prepared for major algorithm changes and updates as they happen. This is otherwise known as the SEO marathon – the most grueling and physically exhausting event (especially if your bottom line suffers due to rank loss) that your site will go through.

SEO Will Not Stop Changing… At Least in the Foreseeable Future

SEO will continue to evolve every year, and Google continues to show their hand at wanting their customers (people using Google to search) to have the best possible experience when they refer a website for any particular topic. This all comes back to the importance of your site loading quick, giving unique and quality content that is relevant to the searcher and having a well-structured site that is mobile friendly and delivers authoritative information. We know Google is showing the mobile-friendly label in mobile search engine results, and can only believe that they will continue to value sites that are mobile-friendly as the number of mobile searches continues to grow. I hope that this has inspired you to start your training today and get your site ready for the test that it will be put under as more changes rollout in the search industry.