There are over 1.8 billion websites in the world today, and that number will only increase. The good news is that of that 1.8 billion, only about 1 million are successful. This is still a huge number, but it is a number that dedicated webmasters can beat with the right content marketing strategy and the correct SEO techniques. Before you can worry about what you can do in the future, however, you first need to deal with the past.
Your old website could very well be holding you back if it is slow, outdated, or contains outdated or blacklisted SEO techniques. All of these could rank you lower than you should be, so start your website revolution by first going through these steps:
1. It is Full of Outdated Pages and Information
Outdated pages and information can hold you back from being your best site yet. This is because pages that do not internally link to other pages, or pages that contain black-hat SEO or other outdated web techniques can and do tell Google that your site is not as valuable as others. This can reduce your page ranking. For users, broken links or links that send them to information that they know is out of date can devalue your site to them, which is why it is important to update content as information comes, and remove old and broken pages and links from your site.
2. It Contains Black-Hat SEO Techniques
Black-hat SEO is those spam techniques that webmasters used to boost their SEO ranking before Google improved their algorithms. Nowadays these outdated techniques, such as keyword stuffing and invisible text, don’t work. In fact, they hurt your website’s performance and can even get your site de-listed from Google’s search engine entirely.
3. It Is Not Optimized for Speed and Performance
Google’s algorithms don’t just use your on-site content to determine how good your site is. Things like site speed and format also affect how well you are ranked. Your website needs to be fast, it needs to be secure, and it needs to be updated consistently. If it is not performing as best as it can, it is holding you back.
How to Improve These Problems
There are many ways that your website is holding your business back, but no website faces the same dilemmas. That is why a unique SEO audit needs to be done first to pick out all of the problems on your site so that you know how to start fixing and improving them. The smaller your site, the easier it will be for you to conduct it in-house. For enterprises, however, especially if they have thousands of pages on their website, the best solution will be to hire professional enterprise SEO services.
Your website can be holding you back, but restarting from scratch should not be an option. All you need to do instead is to perform an audit so that you can understand where the problems are, and go about fixing them. The faster you fix them, the better your white-hat SEO efforts and content marketing can work. This will improve your site ranking and the user experience, allowing you to be more successful every day forward.