There are many ways to damage your website’s SEO (ability to show up in internet searches), in my experience there are two main culprits:
- Switching SEO plugins
- Redesigning a website
In both situations, the cause of the loss of SEO is the same, messing up your page titles.
By default an SEO plugin is going to make your website titles:
<page title> – <website title>
So if your page is named Home, or Homepage and your business is Seattle Web Search your title will be:
- Home – Seattle Web Search
- Homepage – Seattle Web Search
Our business does not sell homes, so that is not a keyword we want to show up in searches for. You want to optimize the title with keywords that will bring business and visitors to your website. You should replace Home with the services you provide.
A good rule of thumb for thinking about keywords is to ask yourself 3 questions.
- What are you offering.
- Who are you offering it too.
- And why should they care.
What > Who > Why
SEO services > small businesses > get more traffic to your website, do more business
Try and get as specific as possible, small business is too broad a term. There are 657,529 small businesses in Seattle, do you really need to compete with all of them?
By getting more specific you reduce the amount of competition you need to beat to get results.
SEO services > realtors > get more traffic to your website, get more new listings
There are 15,968 realtors in Seattle, that is 2.5% the amount of competition vs targeting small businesses. You will have to make 1/40th the amount of effort to get results. Also notice how the why can now be more more specific to the who.
“get more listings” is going to rank well specifically for realtors, vs. “do more business”.
Back to the purpose of this blog post.
DO NOT change your SEO plugin unless you know what you are doing.
If you don’t export the data from your previous SEO plugin into your new SEO plugin you are going to wipe all your titles back to defaults that are using less valuable keywords and don’t maximize the real estate that you have to use in your titles (60 characters).
I highly recommend using a program like Screaming Frog SEO to backup your titles now just incase.
Redesigning a website can often result in the same issue (wiping titles back to default), as well as failing to properly handle existing URLs and redirects.
