How to reverse declining Google rankings?

[simonukss]

We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back.

We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to:

• perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software

• put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry

• provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community

• undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers

Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell?  Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.

[Lumina]

All of that sounds very good and ambitious! While you cover a lot of bases, I think putting a lot of your energy into your audit will prove to be worthwhile. Making sure your site is mobile-optimized, your content isn't lacking or overstuffed with keywords, no duplicate entries, nor errors, light code, etc. There are always small improvements that can be made, and while they may not do much on their own, collectively it can mean a lot. Blogging and social are always a great asset, but care starts at home, so to speak.

[simonukss]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for your email, it is very much appreciated. We definitely have issues and we will look to address these. Specifically, Moz Pro is reporting:

6344 Duplicate Page Content Issues and 13109 Title Element is too longHow big an impact do these type of things generally have?Thanks

[Lumina]

Pretty big. Duplicate content is a no-no and certainly has a sizable impact on your rankings. Title elements aren't necessarily as big a deal - however, usually, longer titles means they were never keyword-optimized to begin with. You can semi-automate that process, but no matter what you do, make sure you don't have duplicate titles.

[simonukss]

Thanks - is there any guidance available anywhere on how to semi automate that process?

[Lumina]

What tools are at your disposal depends strongly on how your site was built and what you and your team have access to. I've not used any tools that automate titles, so I wouldn't want to recommend anything in particular, but searching such a topic in the Moz forums would likely lead you in a good direction.

[Redrobix]

I would say there isn't a hard and fast rule. However, having a content audit is of utmost importance. It's easier to automate if you are running an e-commerce site whereby product names can combine with certain key phrases.

I would support having a content strategy team to fix up the title elements and duplication issues (this could be your tagging/categorisation/internal linking issues)

[MarieHaynes]

I have a few thoughts.

The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on:

https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

"put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry"

Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry."

If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis.

The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other.

Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"