Proactive SEO: Navigating Challenges Through Risk Mitigation

Intro

As more firms allocate resources to digital marketing, SEO is becoming increasingly competitive. Even local businesses spend big on SEO strategies that boost business and increase brand exposure.

Staying ahead of the curve in the SEO world can be tricky. However, an innovative, proactive approach can help reduce risk and improve your ROI.

Even simple changes, like utilizing an SEO tracker to keep you up to date with organic rankings, can make a world of difference to your digital marketing strategy.

Premortem Brainstorming

SEO is notoriously complex. An effective SEO strategy uses a range of techniques like link building, keyword research, and hreflang tagging to promote high-quality content and draw visitors to your website. It is easy to get overwhelmed, even if you’re a seasoned SEO pro.

Before embarking on a new SEO project, consider hosting a premortem brainstorming session with your marketing team. Premortem brainstorming is a risk management method that was invented by Gary Klein in 2007 to help folks understand the challenges they may face. By identifying issues early, your team can work backward to find solutions and keep the project on track.

Prepare for an SEO premortem by asking your team to brainstorm before joining the meeting. Have them consider key questions like “What could make us miss our targets?”, “What SEO-oriented lessons have we learned in the past?”, and “What excites you about the upcoming project?”.

These questions are sure to yield plenty of insights and help you identify common issues. If, for example, your whole team is worried about a project that involves launching a new website, you can use the brainstorming session to identify potential issues before the launch day arrives. If you work in person, keep your premortem board in a centrally located area. This will remind your team of the challenges they face and the strategies you have devised to overcome them.

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Analyzing SERPs

Optimizing pages for search engine results pages is key to effective SEO. However, many marketing teams are unaware of how exactly SERPs work or how they can improve their ranking on sites like Google.

Take control of your SERP strategy by utilizing a SERP checker. This is particularly important if you run a local business and have noticed other nearby businesses upping their SEO game. SERP checkers can break down traffic by region and help you find keyword opportunities that draw highly qualified leads to your business.

Automated SERP tools can alert you to sudden changes in the SEO world, too. This is important, as you need to react quickly to changes caused by competitors or Google Search Central. An automated SERP tool keeps you one step ahead of the game and increases your operational agility as an SEO pro.

Auditing Your Site

Audits are usually seen as reactive inspections of your past and current performance. However, a detailed audit is also the first step towards more proactive, low-risk SEO at your firm. An effective website audit should identify key challenges and opportunities like:

• Meta tags: These tell SERPs what your page is about and are key to driving traffic towards your site.
• XML Sitemap: You are sure to lose out on traffic if Google is not crawling all of your pages. Ensure your XML sitemap is correctly formatted by using a web audit service.
• Broken Links: Broken links undermine your SEO score and make it harder for Google to crawl your site. Automated auditors can quickly crawl your site and find any issues.
• Indexing Issues: An audit can identify non-indexed pages to help you remove duplicate content while increasing the quality of your website.
• Mobile versus Desktop Traffic: Knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you make strategic changes to the way you design your site and engage web users.

SEO auditing tools can save you money, too. SEO professionals typically charge over $150 per hour to compile a report for a single site. Web audit tools can complete a similar function at a fraction of the price and at a much faster speed.

Automated auditing tools are particularly helpful if you are planning to change the way you promote your digital content. Auditing tools keep you abreast of any changes to your traffic and show you whether or not your changes have been effective. This reduces the risk of failure, as you will be able to make modifications on the fly.

Risk Mitigation

Effective SEO is all about generating reliable growth for your social pages and website. This low-risk approach to digital marketing will steadily increase sales over time and help you rise through the rankings. You can secure your long-term success by implementing a risk mitigation strategy that includes:

• Risk Identification: Use your web audit and SERP checker to identify potential risks. Keep a shortlist of prominent SEO risks like keyword cannibalization and site speed issues. Also, identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, as those can harm rankings if your site gets hacked.
• Tracking: The risks you identify should be measurable. Keep a tab on competitors using the competitor's pages and try to measure your performance against theirs. This will help you spot changes to your SEO and take proactive steps to outperform the competition.
• Reporting: Risks evolve as your business grows. Take risk reporting seriously and keep your stakeholders up to date with the biggest SEO risks you face today. This may even help you secure a bigger budget for future risk-management projects.

Risk management is key to proactive, low-risk SEO. Keep track of key metrics using web audit tools and export the data you gather to worksheets for stakeholders. This will minimize the chance of competitors catching you unaware and will speed up your response time should something go awry.

Low-Risk Strategies

Careful experimentation can help you tweak your web presence and boost your brand online. Subtle changes, like repositioning buttons or changing the font you use, can have a profound impact on internal traffic and the user experience.

Start employing some low-risk strategies by utilizing A/B testing. A/B testing is a staple of the digital marketing world and is the best way to determine whether or not a change will be effective. A/B testing works by redirecting half of your visitors to your standard page and the other half to a version of your website with the changes that you wish to test.

If your site is still growing, you can set yourself up for future success by writing high-quality, original content. This is a proactive approach to SEO, as search engines like Google prioritize content that they believe users will want to see. Write evergreen content that will still be relevant in five years' time and try to produce pages that add real value to your audience’s lives. This will help generate reliable traffic, too, as evergreen pages tend to perform well and produce plenty of inbound traffic to your product or service.

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Shifting Social Scene

News recently broke that Facebook and Instagram will be launching a subscription-tier membership for folks who want to use social media without any adverts. People in the EU who use Meta-owned platforms will be able to pay €9.99 to ensure that their data is not collected by the social media giant, too.

X, formerly, Twitter, has taken a similar approach to ad-free browsing. Users across the globe can now pay £16 per month for the ad-free Premium+ service.

This sudden change could spell disaster for your firm if you rely heavily on boosting your events or products on sites like Facebook. If social users choose to subscribe, you may find that your ability to reach new leads online is undermined.

Rather than seeing this as a setback, consider siphoning some of your marketing away from social spending and toward proactive SEO strategies. Increasing the funds you spend on SEO strategies like keyword bidding or link building can dramatically increase the traffic to your site while potentially reducing your cost per click.

Pivoting away from social for SEO purposes can free up your team’s capacity to produce more high-quality content on your site. This kind of high-quality content is more likely to entertain web users and may draw other content creators to your website. Consider teaming up with these content creators to produce user-generated content that circumnavigates potential ad-free subscriptions while boosting your SEO strategy.

If you still want to keep your hand in the social game, consider teaming up with influencers who produce user-generated content. User-generated content can boost your SEO strategy as influencers typically produce high-quality, authentic content that resonates with SERPs like Google. UGC on your website can be a powerful tool, too, as many consumer reviews feature plenty of keyword-rich content and links to your product pages.

Conclusion

Proactive SEO strategies can get you ahead of the competition and generate reliable growth for years to come. Get the ball rolling with a premortem meeting to identify a few low-risk strategies that will support your next digital marketing project. Then draft up a few high-quality, evergreen webpages to support your site. Remember to use risk-mitigating web audits when strategizing your next SEO project and follow up on changes by tracking any changes to your ranking.