Penguin 2.0 - Need help solving issues . .

[gdavies09031977]

This post is deleted!

[Ron_McCabe]

Gareth,

I do not know this for sure but my suspicion is that your content is not unique and/or has not been updated for awhile. You should get some competitive key word research done and create content that reflects the traffic you are wanting to draw.

I would also look at your inbound links. At a glance they look like they are not optimized for local.

I would also check your web site speed. If you are familiar with Google analytics you should also see if there are pages with an excessively high bounce rate and see what you can do to correct this.

There are a lot of things that can be done.  You may want to look at the value of the leads you were getting off of the web versus what it is going to cost for someone to address these issues and present this to your management.  I suspect your management does not clearly understand how this is effecting revenues or they would allocate the funds to get these things fixed. In order to fix these things it is going to take time, knowledge and/or money. any way you slice it is going to cost you.  You just need to figure out internally if it is a good use of your time to learn SEO or if it is more efficient to outsource this.

If you need to do this yourself I would dive into in Moz university and learn what you need to fix this. Expect to invest at least 100 hours learning the basics so you can develop a plan.

Ron

[eyepaq]

Hi Gareth,

First of all your issue might not be Penguin related  -> http://screencast.com/t/ocuuKXoKUz0v

Just because the drop "happen" after the last penguin update and also because your link profile dosen't look like a penguin candidate.

Also you should check and see if you have some manual action (maybe you got hacked or something) - now you can see that in Web master Tools - hope you the account already in place.

That being said I would't invest a dime in SEO at this stage but I would definitely invest in redoing the site - there is so much room to make it more friendly and attractive - starting with the font size and the way the products are featured and presented, images as far as resolution, quality, navigation flow and many more.

On the SEO side just make sure you have the right thing sin place - and again, no need for SEO "experts" sending advice and invoices - just take care of the normal stuff like Title tags, and descriptions and H1 that are all working as one. Target a keyword per page and push some informative descriptions and reviews and images, videos on those pages.

Just my 2c.

[gdavies09031977]

Thanks for coming back to me Ron. Our content is definitely unique, in respect that we have wrote it all by hand ourselves, though we might be guilty of duplicating some content on similar product pages throughout the site.

It may also be the case that our content isn't as good as it could be, which is the kind of thing I need to work on.

I am 'the management' (I did mention we are a company of only 8 people), and I do have a fair grasp on the need for good SEO and how it is effecting revenues, sadly though cash in king, and we don't have sufficient at the moment to spend on a high quality (and hence high cost) SEO professional, hence why I am seeking advice here myself to try and find a solution to the issue in the first instance.

My biggest concern really is what has caused us to take the hit to traffic and rankings, all other things being equal we have seen good natural growth in visitor numbers over the past 4 years, and we have never undertaken black hat SEO (link schemes, buying links etc).

[gdavies09031977]

Hi Eyepaq,

Many thanks for coming back to me. Can I ask how you produced that graph? What metrics is it measuring to come up with an overall SEO visibility measure? Are you able to identify exactly what elements are leading to that drop?

That is useful input, and good to know that our link profile doesn't look like a Penguin candidate - can I ask how you went about making that assessment, I wasn't sure how to go about this myself, and it is one area I was concerned we might be getting penalised for,

Not that we have ever undertaken any black hat SEO, but as a small company doing this ourselves, it is only really low PR business directories, article and press releases and the like that we have been able to use to build back links. So I did wonder if Google was somehow thinking our low PR back links were bad?

So if it is not Penguin, I assume (given that nothing changed on the site during that period) that it must be another algorithm change to cause such a massive drop in that SEO visibility measure?

You are also absolutely right that the site is in need of a rebuild and redesign, and I have this planned in for later in the year, but that presumably still doesn't explain the massive over night drop off during May, does it?

Thanks,

Gareth

[gdavies09031977]

Ron,

You mention site speed as a factor - is our site particularly slow at loading then, is this something that might be affecting our ranking? We use a generic hosting company, so could that be a factor - is there any merit in using a dedicated server etc?

Thanks,

Gareth