SEO Strategy Audit

[RobertChapman]

Greetings Mozzers.

I would really appreciate some input / advice / a sanity check on our existing SEO strategy.

A year into implementing the strategy (outlined below) there appears to be no uplift in our existing traffic volume. I guess i'm wondering.

• • Am I on the right track?
• • Is there something I'm perhaps additional should be doing / i'm doing something wrong?
• • Am I suffering from Penguin?

The strategy:

We produce a range of content, this is written 100% for our audience, How-to guides, infographics, industry news etc. - this has lead to getting a wide range of publications with high powered relevant domains, widely shared and read. As a result we now have a series of ongoing columns where we regularly produce articles that our widely read and shared.

We have a wide variety of homepage and deep links from quality sources.

We have our own blog producing a wide range of content relevant to our audience. Industry trends, news, changes that affect our readers, guides.

We optimise our pages using the Moz Page Grader for select keywords.

We've structured our site architecture appropriately for the most important pages.

Additional info:

We received a WMT penalty last year in march - unnatural links. We engaged an SEO agency who simply went rogue, automated link building with spun articles.

We fired the agency, asked them to remove the links they had "created" and set about a resubmission. Between March and May when we made our resubmission traffic dropped 40%. Now we did have he resubmission accepted after several reconsiderations but  whilst we've seen a slight recovery we have plateaued for almost a year.

This penalty obviously straddles the time penguin arrived, so I wonder if perhaps we haven't seen a recovery as we are still affected by penguin. Despite all the great work we have done.

If anyone has any advice or insight, please do get in touch.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Robert,

It seems like your strategy is right now and you were unfortunate to hire an agency that has resulted in the penalty. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I have seen websites that have never recovered from a penalty, even after having the reconsideration request accepted. However, looking on the positive side, and with the links you are/have built there shouldn't be any reason why you shouldn't start to see a recovery.

When you got them to remove the links, did they get them removed or use the disavow tool. The problem with using the disavow tool is that some agencies aren't sure what is a good link and what is a bad link so if they just got rid of everything then you have effectively started from scratch but with a penalty hanging over your head so it is going to be hard to rank again.

Look at your backlink profile again and compare it to what it was before the penalty (if possible) and then see if you still have any links that look suspect. Any article directores or poor quality directories that are still there, get them taken down.