SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

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Case Study: Turning SEO work off

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I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

I’m working hard to streamline a bunch of…

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I’m working hard to streamline a bunch of systems, both my internal processes and the packages I sell and offer.

Internally I’ve made a system that I interact with for my SEO work. Basically I work out the SEO strategy based on the research, then the system creates a file that I import to the site which acts as my starting point for the project.

I’ve also really made communication more streamlined with a system I created that allows me to rapidly create customised template messages, and also store examples of messages that come up every now and then (but not very often) so I can refer to those the next time I need to send a similar message.

From a selling perspective I’m very keen to get some really strict packages I can sell to people. Strict in that we both know what’s involved and I don’t deviate from them. I all too often become the go to for my clients for bespoke changes even if they’re not paying for a regular maintenance package. I need to change that to make things easier on myself.

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