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How are you responding to Google’s recent changes?

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Every now and then we all need a good kick square in the pants to wake us up and get us to pay attention. The many Google algorithm changes last month hopefully did that for you – if not, they should have. But many were not affected and so there is this false sense of security that “hey, it can’t happen to me”. But the reality is that Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes per year – yes, hundreds. Most are small and go unnoticed and then every few months there are some real eye-openers too. But the truth is, any of those small changes may have a very big impact on your site. Remember even this last set of sweeping changes only affected about 12% of the websites, but trust me, if you’re in that 12% knowing that 88% of the others out there were not affected is of no comfort.

Be Prepared

So, if like most people, you weren’t affected by these recent changes then “congrats”. But don’t slip into a false and unwarranted sense of confidence. Instead use this as a “bullet dodged” and an opportunity for some reflection. Ask yourself this, “what would you do if you lost 70% of your traffic overnight?”. Facts are those that were majorly impacted by these changes are dealing with that question right now.

So now is the time to get prepared for the next round of changes inevitably coming down the turnpike. To do that you really need to start with a full SEO backlink analysis of your site. You will likely be very surprised when you step back and objectively look at your linkbuilding profile. It’s something you should be doing on a monthly basis and that is exactly why we’ve introduced a new set of services on ArticlesOnTap.com today to address those needs – our SEO Backlink Analysis services.

Be Consistent

Keeping on top of your own site is not just prudent, it’s essential. The fact is if you’re not minding the store, who is? Our tendency with SEO is to fall into ruts. We tend to do the same things over and over again. But doing that creates a footprint and leaves obvious signs of unnatural linkbuilding activity on your domain. That’s why you need to monitor your progress on a monthly basis. Now you can either do that with our service or you can do it yourself via a terrific tool like SEO Spyglass (one of our all time favorite SEO tools).

While purchasing the product has its advantages, so does the service approach. The problem with doing it yourself is that you have to do it and you have to remember to do it. That’s why we setup the service to be a monthly service so that you could simply set it up with us once and have consistent and reliable reporting on a monthly basis (billed quarterly). Probably the single biggest limitation that we find with people getting results is not lack of knowledge or lack of software, it’s a lack of action. So one of the smartest things that you can do is to remove yourself from the equation and just automate as many of your SEO tasks as possible. This way you know that they will be consistently performed.

That is also the same reason why we launched our SEO Automated Link Building Services – automation and outsourcing is the key. Many people simply do not have the time, even though they do have the knowledge, to keep up with their SEO and that is a recipe for failure.

Think Outside The Box & Check Out Your Competition

But don’t limit your thinking to just maintaining. You can also use this SEO Backlink Analysis service to put your competitor’s under the microscope as well and this is a tremendously effective SEO strategy. Mike and I don’t enter a single niche without a thorough analysis of our competitors and we monitor them just like our own sites. After you’ve gone through it once, you’ll really question yourself as to how you ever considered doing SEO any other way.

By performing a thorough link analysis on your competition you can gleam all kinds of great information such as:

• What keywords are they targeting?
• What high PR links do they have? And can you get links there too?
• What linking strategies are they using? We recently found a site a head of us in one of our niches that was relying almost entirely on profile links which was a very interesting fact. Well, can you guess what our response was? You bet. We ordered up a bunch of profile links for our site as well.
• How keyword diverse is their linkbuilding strategy?
• What does their domain diversity look like in comparison to yours?
• And many, many more useful bits of information…

Summary

The fact is that backlink analysis is one of the key cornerstones to effective SEO. Learning from past efforts and the efforts of others (your competition) is the single fastest way to get the desired results you’re after. You can chop months off of your SEO campaigns because you will be armed the data to know exactly what you’ve got to do to achieve the rankings you’re after. Honestly, after you look at your first SEO backlink analysis report you will realize why we put so much emphasis on this SEO tactic in our own practices and our recommendations to you (either via our services or just purchasing SEO Spyglass and doing it yourself). In the end anything less is like flying blind and let me tell you, as a private instrument rated pilot, that is not an enjoyable feeling (ask me how I know – I’ve had an instrument failure while flying in instrument only conditions with zero visibility – no fun at all) !

 

Tags: google algorithm changes, recovering from google changes, what to do after google changes