Last week, we talked about how you should wait roughly six months before you judge the efficacy of your SEO strategy. Now, this naturally leads into the follow-up question, “Hey, it’s been six months since I did this SEO work. I’m not seeing any real increase in my performance. Should I change something up or should I just stop?” Well, the last part of that question is easy.
Don’t Just Stop
You’re not going to gain anything by just stopping and if anything else you just have wasted the time that you had already spent. That’s silly. So, we’re wondering why we might not be seeing any improvements despite us having done some SEO towards this; and there’s any number of reasons, but we’ll hit the top ones first.
Build Content Strategically
Number one, your content just isn’t competitive with the other content that’s out there for the same topics. Now, one great way to judge how good your content is – and to judge what you should be aiming for – is to actually perform a Google search for the phrase that you’re looking to rank for. See what’s ranking for it, and give that content a read. One of the main parts of the ‘Skyscraper Technique’ that we love so much at Wikimotive is taking a piece of content that a competitor has written, building upon it to write a way better piece of content, and then adding to it continuously until there’s simply no better answer out there for that search query.
But, freshness & thoroughness only go so far. Google’s got no reason to say that you’re offering up the best answer to a query, if it can’t find it.
Update Your Sitemap
I can tell you from experience that we frequently get new clients to Wikimotive who have worked with a previous vendor and they think that they have a lot of content on their website; but if you check the site map, there’s nothing there. This makes it difficult for Google to identify, and properly crawl that content which is a waste of time, energy, and most importantly that dealer’s marketing budget. So, each time you create a new piece of content (ex. landing page, blog post), make sure that it’s added to your sitemap, and that it’s submitted to Google Search Console. And if you notice that a piece of content hasn’t been added to your sitemap, be sure and address that with your provider to ensure it’s corrected.