SEO's are Marriage Counsellors and Detectives

All good SEO agencies have to be good marriage counsellors and detectives. What I mean by this is we have to make sure the relationship between our client’s sites and Google blossoms and flourishes. But sometimes we inherit a situation which resembles a messy divorce. This usually happens when Google has completely cut ties with a new client’s site and they come to us with a problem. This is usually because Google has penalised them or worse still has completely banned them.

Although every challenge has its rewards an SEO agency is only as good as the information it has at its disposal. So to rectify the problem we put our detective hats on and go to work at the crime scene. Now, when a new client approaches bdr and says “My last SEO agency completely messed up my rankings and all my sales have gone down the toilet.” It doesn’t exactly bode well that we will be able to cheerfully pick up the phone and say “Hey guys, would you mind sending over your complete client data and link building sheet? Because we have to try and sort out the mess you created.”

So with our detective hats on we set about using the tools at our disposal. If the client has Google Analytics and Webmaster tools installed on their site, then great. We can check all the traffic stats, referrals and check for errors on the site. We also use a number of other tools, mostly SEO moz which is in our opinion the best source of SEO tools on the net. We run back link analysis and look for any suspect link building techniques.

To find out why a site has been penalised we always start on the site and work our way out. Once we have ascertained if the site is accessible and search engine friendly we can check all the other stuff that points to the site. In some cases we have even found that it is nasty competitors which have utilised some brutal black hat methods.

Most of the time we find out that it is a mixture of on and off-site issues. Usually the on-site problems are relatively easy to solve. However, if the previous SEO agency has built lots of low quality links perhaps from bad neighbourhoods it can have an immediate bad effect or sometimes it can be left undetected for quite some time.

We have had clients come to us after doing their own SEO and we alert them to several on-site problems such as multiple identical homepages, absent .htaccess file and hidden text along with poor quality link building and they say “Well, we’ve been doing this for years with no problem.” Well, Google is a fickle beast and it can rain down all kinds of hurt at a drop of a hat. Ensuring your site is accessible and friendly reduces the risk of search engine wrath.

Winning back the trust of Google can take time, patience and perseverance much like a shaky marriage. If you find poor quality links, contacting the sites or logging in and deleting them does help. Buying a few links from highly trusted sites is ok as well as long as you know they are high quality and you don’t rely too heavily on them. Regaining trust and creating a balanced back link profile is the name of the game. A wide variety of quality links from trusted sources goes a long way. Also creating content which can be syndicated and re-published elsewhere promotes and not only provides votes but actual endorsements as well.

Mounting a comeback from a Google penalty like an 80’s pop legend is not impossible, but it can take time and a lot of work to re-gain the trust of the old ball n’ chain.