Timothy Carter

Chief Revenue Officer at SEO Company

Industry veteran Timothy Carter is SEO.co’s Chief Revenue Officer. Tim leads all revenue for the company and oversees all customer-facing teams for SEO (search engine optimization) – including sales, marketing & customer success.

He has spent more than 20 years in the world of SEO & Digital Marketing leading, building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.

When he’s not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach…preferably in Hawaii.

Over the years he’s written for publications like ForbesEntrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.

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Trending SEO vs. Evergreen SEO
Timothy Carter

Trending SEO vs. Evergreen SEO: Differences & What to Target

When it comes to SEO content, you can choose from two types: trending content and evergreen content. In this article, we’ll go over what trending content and evergreen content are, the pros and cons of each, and why you should create both for a successful SEO strategy. Let’s get started! What is Trending Content? Trending content is content that’s relevant now but won’t be in the future. Think of it like a fashion trend. It could be the hot new thing for a season and then quickly become outdated. Some examples of trending content include: Breaking news Event coverage Holiday or seasonal topics Anything time-sensitive Content related to COVID-19 would also fit into this category. It’s highly relevant now, but once the pandemic more fully ends, not so much. You see a lot of trending content from news websites. That’s because it’s their job to report on the latest to the masses. But businesses can leverage trending content as well. Anything that’s eye-grabbing, controversial, or creates some type of buzz may be worth creating content about because it could increase your web traffic. And who knows? Your trending content might go viral, giving your brand a lot of sudden exposure. To create trending content, look for topics that are just starting to become popular. For example, type a topic into Google Trends to see if it shows an upward search trend. If it does, it might be a good opportunity to take advantage of the increased search volume. Source The Benefits of Trending Content So why create trending content? Well, many reasons. For one, there’s less competition to rank for trending topics. If the keyword hasn’t been on many people’s radar until now, there won’t be much content ranking for it. That means it’ll be easier for you to stake your claim in the SERPs. Once you publish trending content, you’ll also see SEO results faster. With less competition, your trending content could rise to the top of search results in just a few days. All in all, trending content can help increase your brand’s online visibility by a lot in a short amount of time. The key is to identify trending topics early on and then be the first to publish about them. The Drawbacks of Trending Content Of course, the one big downside to trending content is that the SEO benefits aren’t guaranteed to last. Sure, you might make the number one search result for “2022 real estate market trends in Orlando, Florida,” but nobody’s going to be searching for that in a year. In other words, once the trend goes away or the keyword becomes irrelevant, you’ll see your web traffic start to drop. What is Evergreen Content? Now that you know about trending content, let’s talk about evergreen content. Evergreen content is anything that is relevant now and in the future. No matter what happens, there will always be people interested in the topic. Content types that work great as evergreen pieces include: Ultimate guides Whitepapers Case studies Checklists Infographics The key is to focus on quality over quantity. Cover the topic in full and in a way that nobody has done before. That way, your content has a better chance of standing the test of time. Creating evergreen content starts with keyword research. See how much search volume a keyword gets with an SEO tool like Keywords Everywhere. If the search traffic is steady, then it may make a good evergreen topic. Ideally, you want to identify keywords whose search volume is growing. Then create content on it. By getting on the bandwagon early, you have a better chance to stake your claim in the SERPs. Once you’ve published an evergreen piece, review it at least once per year. This helps you make minor updates to keep it from becoming outdated. Say you publish the “Ultimate Guide to Creating a WordPress Blog.” Then WordPress releases an update that slightly changes the process for creating a new site. In that case, you’ll want to update your guide quickly, so that Google doesn’t demote it for containing outdated information. You can also repromote evergreen content. Chances are you’ll gain new audience members over time. So by re-promoting your evergreen content, you give them a chance to consume the great stuff you made in the past and thereby increase your web traffic even more. You can also repurpose evergreen content into different content forms. For example, you could turn a blog article into a podcast episode or summarize a video into a social media post. Publish your content across different mediums to reach the most amount of people. And you can always boost your evergreen content by doing link-building outreach. That means contacting relevant high-domain authority websites, sharing your evergreen content, and requesting a backlink to it. As your site becomes more recognized, this type of outreach will get easier. Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/evergreen-content/362554/ The Benefits of Evergreen Content The main benefit of evergreen content is that it can be a permanent source of web traffic. Once you publish it, you can enjoy a steady and reliable stream of visitors to your site. And the higher your evergreen content ranks on search engines, the easier it will be to gain backlinks. Sites looking for a source are more likely to link to yours, which then boosts your SEO even more, creating a kind of snowball effect. Finally, there’s usually already a lot of content on an evergreen topic out there, which means you’ll have plenty of resources for your research. The Drawbacks & Disadvantages of Evergreen Content That said, evergreen content still comes with some disadvantages. For one, when other evergreen content on the topic already exists, it’s highly competitive to get yours to rank. Finding a foothold in the SERPs can become extremely difficult. Secondly, developing good evergreen content takes a lot of time. You’ll have to do extensive research and go through several revisions to make the piece stand out. And lastly, promoting evergreen content also takes

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Technical SEO 101: 8 Methods for Improving Technical SEO
Timothy Carter

Technical SEO 101: 8 Methods for Improving Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves a web of complex strategies that can be confusing to implement. If you’re trying to do SEO on your own, you’re up against a massive learning curve that you will probably struggle to get through. If you’re overwhelmed just thinking about all the components of technical SEO, this article will help. Here we discuss how to improve the most important aspects of technical SEO to get your website ranking better in the search engines. What is technical SEO? Technical SEO is exactly what it sounds like: technical search engine optimization techniques. In a nutshell, there are numerous ways to get your website ranking in the search engines by performing a variety of technical tasks. Technical on-page SEO could include one of several hundred Google ranking factors. Why you need technical SEO There are a variety of SEO components that influence how your web pages rank in the search engines, and technical SEO is critical. Having a beautiful website with amazing content is important but won’t make your site rank well in the search engines unless you’ve properly implemented and optimized technical SEO. In other words, the visual and content aspects of your website make your visitors happy, while technical SEO makes search engines happy. The technical components of SEO communicate the information required for search engines to find, crawl, render, index, and rank your web pages. If your technical SEO is off, your web pages won’t rank well. 8 Critical technical SEO components to implement immediately When your goal is to implement stronger technical SEO, you’ll need to look at a variety of factors on your website. With some components, you’ll only need to make small adjustments, while other components will require an overhaul. Here are 8 things to do right away in order to strengthen your technical SEO. 1. Optimize your website architecture Site architecture is how your web pages are organized, including the structure and hierarchy. Few things can help your technical SEO as much as improving your site architecture. That’s because search engine crawlers can’t navigate and index a site with a complicated architecture. If your site doesn’t get indexed, it won’t turn up in search results. A hierarchical site structure is best The ideal site structure is what SEOs call “flat and hierarchical.” This type of architecture organizes your site’s web pages so that they are all connected simply and efficiently. Under this hierarchy, each page is only a few clicks away from your main page. For instance, say you have 100 total web pages on your site. Each of those 100 web pages can be accessed within three or fewer clicks. Search engine crawlers have a limited time to crawl your site, and if they can’t get to all of your pages quickly, pages will be left behind, unindexed. To view the complexity (or simplicity) of your site’s structure, run your domain name through an online Visual Site Mapper. It’s a simple tool that can show you so much about your site’s structure. Limit the use of subdirectories Ideally, you’ll want to contain all of your web pages within a hierarchy of one directory past your main directory. The more directories search engine spiders need to explore, the more of your crawl budget will be spent, which means fewer pages will get indexed. Use breadcrumb navigation Breadcrumb navigation is highly useful for both users and SEO. With this type of navigation, search engine crawlers have an easier time finding additional pages on your website. Here’s a basic example of what breadcrumb navigation looks like: SEO.co > How Long Does it Take to Rank on Google? If you have numerous web pages, use this type of navigation to help both visitors and search engines easily find their way through your site. 2. Resolve all web page indexing issues Do you know if your web pages are indexed properly in Google? It’s possible that some of your pages haven’t been indexed at all. There are two ways to discover potential indexing issues. First, perform a site search in Google to see what web pages have been indexed. Go to Google and type in: site:yoursite.com (replacing yoursite.com with your website domain) and you should generate a bunch of search results from your domain. Any web page that doesn’t come up in the results hasn’t been indexed, which means it won’t come up in searches. Another way to check for indexing issues is to use the Index Coverage Report inside of Google Search Console. This tool will give you more specific information related to any indexing issues Google encountered with your website. When you find any indexing issues, you can fix them with the following: Create an XML sitemap for your website. XML sitemaps have been around for a while and are still an important source for search engine spiders to find URLs. Not sure if your sitemap is correct? You can check your sitemap here. Create more internal links. When you have web pages further away from your home page, they’re harder for search engine spiders to crawl and index. Creating internal links helps search engines find and crawl more of your web pages. Use Google Search Console’s “Inspect” feature. This tool will tell you exactly why your web pages aren’t indexed and will show you how Google renders your pages that have been indexed. 3. Create a consistent URL structure Does your URL structure make logical sense? When visitors are on a particular page, does your directory structure and page URL tell them exactly where they are? For example, say you publish a bunch of photos from your 2020 trip to the Bahamas. A logical URL structure might look like this: https://yoursite.com/photos/2020-Bahamas/ With this URL structure, the ‘photos’ subdirectory is self-explanatory, and you can place additional directories under this main category in the future. This type of organization also helps search engines understand that all the content underneath the ‘photos’ directory is related. 4. Optimize your content Content optimization serves both visitors and

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Ultimate Local SEO Checklist
Timothy Carter

Ultimate Local SEO Checklist

If a business has a physical address, then you probably already know that you need local search engine optimization or local SEO. For many small business owners, this type of SEO continues to be a mystery, and it shouldn’t be. The concept is actually easy to incorporate in any web design or marketing strategy. This guide goes through everything that businesses should know when learning how to use local SEO more effectively for their markets. Types of Businesses That Need Local SEO In a phrase, any business can use local SEO, but it’s more effective if a business has a definitive physical location. However, if you get most of your business from local clients or customers, local SEO might also be a good idea for you as well. Local restaurants, retail stores, doctor’s offices, dentists, lawyers and so forth all benefit from using some type of locally optimized marketing strategy. If you expect foot traffic from your website, you probably want to be the first to use local SEO. Local SEO vs. Traditional SEO Traditional or national SEO will target broad scope keywords. These keywords aren’t attaching a regional identity. For example, if you’re the marketing team behind Wal-Mart’s new national campaign for cheap tires, then your keywords will likely direct towards all markets and focus on “cheap tires,” “tire discounts” or “tire deals.” However if you are a local auto tire company, you want to focus your keywords around location such as “cheap tires Orlando” or “tire discounts Orlando FL.” Creating a great local SEO strategy is about more than keywords but understanding this difference allows you to do accurate local keyword research, which is part of the whole marketing concept behind being local. Local Profiles on Google Creating profiles in Google is the first thing that any business wanting local traffic must do. Why’s that? Most people are using Google to research products and services, and when they type in something like “new tires Orlando,” a list of businesses that have profiles on Google Places will pop up at the top of the results page for the Orlando, Florida location. This means that businesses must add their complete location and details to Google Places and Google Plus. The profile must contain as much information as possible including a thoughtful description, pictures, contact details, store hours and hopefully reviews. You also want to set up profiles on other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites will undoubtedly come up whenever anyone searches your store’s name or products to learn more information, and you should be the one to control that information. Be Consistent with Every Listing When you start to create profiles and even build a website, you should make sure that your address is consistent on any page that has your name, address and phone number. They should also feature the same main photo and additional images that are consistent with the rest of your profiles. It may seem trivial, but you should never abbreviate one address and not another. Using On-Site Optimization Techniques There are four things to know about local on-site optimization. For one, name, address and phone number must be on every page of your site, such as at the bottom or top. In addition, city and state names should be in the title tags, meta descriptions and content of your site. Schema local markup can also help search engines find your local content better and identify your location for users. Lastly, you can use a KML or keyhole markup language file to further your on-site optimization. The Most Important Factors to Boost Local SEO Rank Reviews, positive feedback and number of profiles is important. Reviews should be on every page that it is possible to have reviews, but Google Places reviews are seen the most, which means that they contribute the most to a local business ranking in search results. Businesses often ask customers to leave reviews or add hints to review when a customer is obviously having a great experience. It’s important that you don’t pay for reviews, but businesses have had some success by offering a free gift if a customer leaves a review. Central Location Matters While having all of the above will definitely boost your ranking, your business may still not be in the lead if you are from the city’s center. That’s because when someone searches for “tires Orlando FL,” Google uses “centroid bias,” which means that the search will look for locations closest to the city center of Orlando. Basic Tips to Boost Local SEO Today This is a rundown of the steps a business owner can take to improve local SEO immediately. 1. Claim a local listing in Google Places. Complete the listing until the profile is 100 percent finished. Images, videos, descriptions, contact information, links and posts are all important to finishing your listing. You do not want to use any keywords or location names in the business title unless it’s critical. For instance, if you own “Cheap Orlando tires Inc” then it’s acceptable, but if your business is “Tires Plus Orlando,” then you wouldn’t write “Cheap Tires Plus Orlando FL.” 2. Spread information through Yext. Yext is a service that allows you to spread your business information to other local platforms in the same format as you did with Google Places. Each of these becomes a “citation,” which is very valuable in terms of local SEO. 3. Set up other important social profiles. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are obviously important for local SEO, but if your business is more visual, you may want to set up a profile on Pinterest or if there is a local directory website that lists all of the local tire places, your business should be on there as well. 4. Build On-Site Local SEO Some of your content on your site can use local SEO keywords such as “SEO in Orlando” or “Orlando SEO”. The links, title tags, anchor text, in-text keywords and meta descriptions should offer city and state keywords that relate to any of the service areas that are within your physical

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How to Optimize for "People Also Search For" or "People Also Ask"
Timothy Carter

How to Optimize for “People Also Search For” or “People Also Ask”

When exploring a topic via Google search, how often do you find everything you need after a single query? If you’re like most people, it takes you a few attempts. You might have to rephrase your query. You might think of a follow-up question to ask. Or you might just be curious to know what kind of related searches and content is out there. That’s one reason why Google has introduced two similar, related searches features: “people also search for” (PASF Keywords) and “people also ask” (PAA) Chances are, you’ve already used both of these dynamic search features as a user, whether you realized it actively or not. But did you know that you can also tailor your (SEO) strategy to get more value out of these features for your brand? What Is People Also Search For (PASF)? Let’s start with a definition of “people also search for” (PASF Keywords). This feature only reveals itself when a user conducts a search, clicks a link, then bounces from the website to get back to the original search engine results pages (SERP), typically with the “back” button of a browser. When this happens, Google adds a “People also search for” section underneath the organic search results you clicked; there, you’ll see an assortment of alternative, related searches, and queries you can click. If you click these, you’ll be taken to entirely new SERP. Google provides PASF Keywords as assistance for people who aren’t able to find the results they want upon initially searching. If you visit a page, then return to the first SERP you encountered, Google takes that as an indication that you didn’t find what you were looking for (and rightly so). Think of it as a search  results safety net designed to capture engagements, interaction, and better experiences for people who were unsatisfied with the initial results provided. What Is People Also Ask (PAA)? “People also ask” (PAA) is similar, but it starts with a different goal and works slightly differently. You’ll see a “People also ask” box near the top of more than half of SERPs. In fact, PAA boxes are now 10 times more popular than featured snippets, and are increasing in visibility and prominence every year. Within this box are suggestions, based on what other queries users have searched for in the past. For example, if you search for “What is a dinosaur?”, you might find PASF keywords in Search results like: What defined a dinosaur? What are dinosaurs considered? What is a dinosaur real? Is a dinosaur a reptile or a bird? You’ll then be able to click on any of these results to reveal a featured snippet and a link to a trustworthy result for that search. It’s kind of like a search-within-a-search, meant to help people answer related searches questions without needing to leave the central SERP. Why Do These Strategies Matter? Why should you care about PASF Keywords and PAA optimization? Sheer presence and visibility. PASF and PAA content appears for more than half of all searches, and that percentage is likely to grow consistently from here. It’s obvious that Google finds PASF Keywords and PAA content to be valuable for users, because this content is prominent and prevalent. Additionally, PASF and PAA boxes are designed to be as high as possible in the SERPs, giving you an opportunity to outrank your competitors in strategies other than strict organic ranking climbing. User intent understanding. Working on your PASF Keywords and PAA optimization strategies will also help you better understand the intent and behavioral patterns of your target audience. Both these recommendation boxes are designed to help users find what they’re looking for – and both rely on high monthly search volume of data to generate personalized searrch result. If you study these appearances carefully, you’ll be able to learn much more about user intent, user behavior, and search patterns; you can then incorporate those lessons into your search engines optimization strategy. Keyword optimization ideas. Any seasoned search engines optimization (SEO) expert can tell you, it’s sometimes difficult to come up with novel ideas for keyword optimization. How do you choose keywords that are simultaneously relevant to your brand, relevant to your users, highly searched, and not highly competitive? Basic keyword research goes a long way, but practicing PASF or PAA optimization can open the door to even better keyword opportunities. A path to “position zero.” Position zero refers to being a featured snippet in an SERP, taking precedence over other organic rankings. Specifically optimizing for these recommendation boxes could help you increase your relevance for commonly asked questions, giving you a straightforward path to position zero optimization. Appealing to users and minimizing bounce rate. Studying PASF recommendations, specifically, can help you better understand why users bounce from your site. If they don’t find what they’re looking for after visiting a search page of your site, Google will use a PASF box to help them find what they are looking for; you can then use this data to make your search page more compelling (and improve time spent on page). How to Optimize for People Also Search For (PASF)? These are some of the best strategies for optimizing for people also search for (PASF Keywords ): Analyze PASF Keywords opportunities. Start by looking at the opportunities available to you. Because PASF Keywords search result only display when you bounce from a specific web page, you’ll need to simulate this bounce manually or use a keyword research tool specifically designed to fetch these types of search result. When users bounce from some of your most popular pages, what kind of PASF content do they see? Which of these suggestions are most relevant to your brand and your audience? Make your content relevant to user search intent. Use a combination of core user queries and PASF keywords recommendations to figure out what your average user search intent is. What kind of content are people looking for and which questions aren’t getting answered sufficiently? Then,

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How to Optimize Your Images for Load Speed
Timothy Carter

How to Optimize Your Images for Load Speed

Site load time wasn’t always a big deal, but Google has made its mission clear: they want the best possible online experience for its users, and that means favoring sites that maximize user experience. In other words, if you’re not working to optimize images on your website, you’re ignoring a critical ranking factor. For the past several years, site load has been a significant Google ranking factor—meaning sites with faster time to load and rank higher than sites with slower ones. If you want to improve your rankings in search engines and give your users an all-around better experience, you need to do everything you can to minimize the time for a load of your site. The best way to do that, and the first place to start, is to optimize your website’s images for load speed. In addition, for every optimized image you upload, make sure you run through the checklist: Does your image have proper dimensions? Is it in an appropriate format? Have you stripped all irrelevant metadata? Keeping your image optimization streamlined is perhaps the best way to keep your site’s time load down and give your users the best possible experience. 1. Resizing Your Images & Lazy Loading There are two ways to think about the “size” of an image, and both can have an impact on loading times. First, “image size” can refer to the amount of data contained in an image SEO, expressed as Kilobytes (Kb) or Megabytes (Mb). Second, it can refer to the physical dimensions of the image when viewed at 100 percent. The amount of data contained in an image is the most important factors that influences time to load. The more data an image has, the longer it takes for a browser to receive and process that data from a server. While the difference between a 1 Mb image and a 200 Kb image may not seem like much, if all of your images are oversized, the impact on your users’ time to load could be enormous. Images with extra-large physical dimensions are the ones with higher amounts of data. Even disregarding the resolution (PPI and DPI), images with larger dimensions have a higher Image file size than their physically smaller counterparts. In addition to slowing down from the sheer amount of data that needs transferred, your load times can be impacted by the process your website takes to scale your images down. Therefore, it’s important to size your images more efficiently. There are several easy ways to resize your images, both in terms of physical dimensions and in terms of file size: Use Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Paint, or any image editing software to decrease the physical dimensions of your image SEO. Keep the width to height ratio the same, but decrease both qualities. Upload your image to a free online image resizer, such as Picresize.com, and download a smaller version of your image SEO to use. Use an automated tool to resize all of your images at once, such as by writing an image optimization processing script in Photoshop. There is no single “ideal” image file size, since many images on your site serve different purposes, but generally, you’ll want to pay attention to the following best practices: Blog images should not be wider than the width of your blog (so if your blog is 700 pixels wide, your images should be 700 pixels wide or less, keeping the same proportions). While everyone has different preferences, the 60-70 per cent quality range seems appropriate for most blogs. Never increase the file size of an image. It leads to blurriness and graininess. Keep a copy of the original. That way, you still have it if you need to make edits. Why size matters even if your CMS automatically resizes images When an Internet browser reaches a site that contains an image, it first loads the full-size image you uploaded. Then, it processes the fact that it must reduce the image file size to fit on the page, so it reloads the image as part of the page. Instead of saving time by loading only the processed version of the image SEO, your user’s browser actually loads the image optimization twice—once for the full-sized version and once for the fitting version. Therefore, it’s important to upload properly sized images to your website no matter what. 2. Using Proper Image Formatting The type of format you use for your images is also important. Most people are familiar with the JPG file formats for images because it is one of the highest image qualities and most relevant formats. It also tends to have the highest file size because it’s made for big, high-quality images, so if you can get away with using a smaller file format for your website, you can decrease your load times. For example, the GIF file format supports transparency and can be animated, but it only supports 256 colors. Because of its color and definition limitations, it is a naturally smaller format. You wouldn’t want to use a GIF for product image optimization or for a flagship piece of photography, but you should definitely consider it for small icons or badges on your site. It won’t save you a ton of data, but every little bit counts. PNG images are typically a larger format than JPG because it features a lossless compression system—meaning, it never loses data integrity no matter how many times it is saved. The same holds true for animated images. JPG images do lose data integrity with each save, but because they are much smaller in image files, they are still the preferred image format for high quality images. Still, PNGs can be useful for smaller images, such as menu images. For today’s web, WebP images are becoming more of the standard because of their fast image load times. Other image formats do exist, but these are the key players you need to understand to make sure your website loads as fast as possible. 3.

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How to Fix a Traffic & Impressions Plateau
Timothy Carter

How to Fix a Website Traffic & Impressions Plateau

SEO is all about increasing organic traffic to your site. So what do you do when your traffic suddenly plateaus? This is a common problem among many growing businesses. They see steady traffic growth for months and then all of the sudden it starts to flatline. Even if your SEO strategy hasn’t changed, seeing diminishing returns like this isn’t uncommon. The question is why. Well, many things can lead to a traffic plateau. In this article, we’ll go over the most common reasons and explain what you can do to fix them: 1. Increase SEO input As you probably know, SEO is a long game. You have to continually work on it to see steady results. SEO inputs fall into three main categories: Publishing quality content Earning quality backlinks Making technical on-page optimizations These are easier said than done, but they are crucial to long-term SEO. Without them, it’s practically guaranteed that your traffic will plateau or sink. So make sure you are working on them at a consistent or increasing rate. 2. Make sure content creation doesn’t outpace link velocity Another reason for traffic plateaus is content creation outpacing link velocity—the rate at which you earn backlinks to your website. If you keep putting out new content but few people are linking to it, that’s a signal to Google that your content isn’t that great, which means your impressions might drop. To fix this, you need to have a good link building strategy. Here are a few you can try: Help A Reporter Out (HARO)—This site connects industry experts like you to reporters looking for sources. If you get quoted, you can win a backlink. Broken link building—This involves finding broken links on other sites, informing the owner, and offering your site as a replacement link. Creating linkable assets—This means creating high-quality content like infographics, case studies, and ultimate guides to attract natural backlinks. Social media promotion—This means sharing link-worthy content on social media to attract more backlinks. Guest posting—This means offering to write content for another website so you can include a backlink to your site. And the list goes on … The key is to try out various strategies or engage link building services that work for you so that your link velocity keeps up with your content velocity. Source: https://bloggingx.com/link-velocity/ 3. Update outdated content Outdated content could also lead to a traffic plateau. It’s not enough to keep publishing fresh content. You also have to make sure your old stuff stays up to date. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. We recommend doing a content audit at least once per year and then updating anything that’s no longer relevant or accurate. This could be old statistics, incomplete information, or just an old date. For example, you might update the headline “Best SEO strategies for 2020” with the current year. 4. Resolve on-site errors & search engine penalties Your web traffic could also be slowing down from search engine penalties. Google penalizes websites for spam, duplicate content, unnatural backlinks, and more. They do this manually or whenever they roll out a new algorithm update. To see if your site has received any penalties, check Google Search Console under “manual actions” for flagged items. Among other things, you may need to delete duplicate pages, fix 404 errors, 301 redirect errors, disavow low-quality backlinks, or remove hidden text (aka keyword stuffing). 5. Improve site loading speed Page speed is also important to Google because it’s a major factor in user experience (UX). So if your website is slow, your SEO will take a hit. To check your site’s loading speed, type the URL into PageSpeed Insights or a similar online speed test. Keep in mind that websites naturally run slower as they develop with more pages and content. The same is true if your site has too many ads and pop-ups. So do whatever you can to clean up your site so that it’s optimized for loading speed. Also, make sure your site is optimized for mobile. Over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices these days. So mobile speed is becoming more important to Google as well. Source: https://www.daniloaz.com/en/5-most-important-reasons-to-increase-your-websites-loading-speed/ 6. Repair site structure Poor site structure will also make your web traffic plateau. If Google can’t understand how your site is organized, they’ll demote it in search rankings. So it’s vital to keep your URL structures, XML sitemap, and internal linking in good condition. URL structures and XML sitemaps help Google site crawlers make sense of your site, while internal linking helps spread domain authority equally across your site’s pages. As your site grows, it’s important to keep it organized. 7. Fix other technical issues Lastly, there are a lot of other technical issues that could be causing a traffic plateau. They include 404 “page not found” errors, improper redirects, server issues, unoptimized images, and more. To fix these, run your site through a broken link checker like the one by Ahrefs to detect broken outbound and inbound links, optimize images to render quickly, and run a site audit. Any technical issues should be addressed sooner than later. Fixing a traffic plateau Ultimately, coming out of a traffic plateau takes time. You can’t expect it to go away immediately. But if you check for the issues listed above and fix what you find, you’re off to a good start! And if you need a professional SEO audit, we’re here to help. We can look under the hood of your website to give you a comprehensive view of the top 200 on and off-site Google ranking factors that could be causing a traffic plateau. Contact us today for a free consultation.  

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