The question “How to check the positioning of the page” (in other words: How to check what the company does with my site) is relatively often asked me, which is not surprising – if someone invests in their website, it expects it to have a specific effect in the form of return from investment (calculated by the number of contacts acquired or sales increase).
There is only one problem, very important – the answer to this question is not simple at all.
At one time, the positioning check was simple – just run any program to check incoming links and look for links containing so-called “anchors SEO” (links that were created by the SEO company to raise the page’s position on given phrases – “Florida real estate”, “New York car rental”, etc.) and check if the SEO company is doing something on the website.
Today, when links obtained / created by positioning companies very often instead of helping to harm, checking the correctness of the positioning process is not so easy, which consists of several issues worth paying attention to.
Link analysis does not always show the positioning process
Since a few years ago the market started to change, forced by the better catching algorithms of these artificial links (and consequently punishing pages with manual or algorithmic filters). Link profile analysis as a measure of the effectiveness / conduct of the positioning process is playing a smaller role.
First of all – links today are less important than they used to be. Today, a page with a small number of links will in most cases rank higher than the one to which a lot of incoming links lead.
Second (related to the first) – it is not easy on the Internet to “remove the sins of the past”. If we do not physically remove the link, even if we use the disavow tool (to disallow unwanted incoming links) they will still be visible in the programs for analyzing them. Often these will be the remains of old positioning works – a year ago, two or even several. Without knowing this, we can easily harm your website.
And finally (to make it even more complicated – the fact that we have a bad profile of incoming links does not mean that you should immediately use the disavow utility. Although Google recommends using it to disavow bad links (i.e., those that we think may decrease the position of a page in search results), sometimes it is better not to do so … do not harm the site.
Need to work carefully with websites
The algorithm is a complex mechanism. It may seem strange to some, but an unoptimized side can rank higher than this “pampered” – and additionally this unoptimized page, as a result of the implementation of repair work, can slip in the search results for lower positions for months.
Therefore, it is not always the lack of optimization on the page that means it is not positioned. I know of cases where the site has ripped for years on competitive phrases, while a given phrase is NOT physically on the page. Optimizing the site for such a phrase will not always keep it in one place – strange, but true. If you are not aware of this, you can have unpleasant conversations afterwards.
The customer must trust the SEO company
Companies are ready to promise anything to get the customer. However, the client, when hiring a specialist to promote his website, a positioning company, MUST trust him. There are situations in which the client actively seeks information on topics related to SEO on the Internet, after which he tries to enforce certain actions on the company himself. Quite often, they are irrational, but the company agrees to just lose it.
Customers want to know what is happening with their websites: what jobs are being undertaken and what will be. However, they must remember that you can not focus on items as the primary purpose of page positioning. No orders will arrive from the item, no sales will increase. The aim of the website promotion is conversion – obtaining a lead (contact for a potential customer), in the store it will be a transaction. If the SEO company succumbs to the client and makes a change that it would not normally make, then when analyzing such a site from the competition’s position, we think that it is not optimized / positioned, right?
The customer can position the website himself
The website owner does not always need an SEO company. Very often, its role comes down to consultancy – the client works on the website himself, using only the knowledge of the person who supervises and checks the entire process so that the website owner does not do something that may harm it. I have bought out links in closed groups of pretzels a few times myself; the thing is about sites that were busy, they were high on Google, they sold very well (stores). But the owners wanted more and … they were ready to take a chance.
The following question arises: “How can I check that the SEO company has an advisory function?”
Conclusions
The market has changed – instead of checking whether the competition is positioning, focus on your website. Competition can (and should) be analyzed – but more so to see if it is doing something that we can use than, for example, the link profile itself. If we do such analyzes, we must remember that in the absence of SEO knowledge, we can easily harm – it’s enough to look at the links and start to duplicate schemes that will harm us as they once hurt the competition (because we will not know that these links have been in the disavow tool for a long time …)
Picture Credit: geralt