Sometimes when working with SEO, you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling. Every factor that goes into a high-performing site seems to be accounted for. So, what should you tackle when you feel like you’ve done it all?

Audit, audit, audit

When it feels like you’ve done all you can do, auditing is the first step to figure out what isn’t actually functioning as well as it could.

There are many different programs that can help here; one, Screaming Frog, can alert you to missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, missing alt tags, duplicate H1 tags, broken links, and so on. While we’re on the subject, Seer Interactive has a helpful article that can show you how to do pretty much anything with Screaming Frog: Check it out here.

Along with Screaming Frog, tools like SEMRush or Moz Analytics can show you if your traction on tracked keywords is decreasing. Depending on which direction you want to focus on, these three tools are quite helpful in determining whether you’re functioning at a high level — and if not, what to do to fix that.

Write your blogs!

We’ve talked about the importance of creating content a lot here at Fujisan, and that’s why we list blogs so high up here. For starters, if you feel like your site’s optimization efforts have hit a ceiling but you don’t have a blog — then boom! You instantly have something to work on now. And if you do have a blog, is itbenefiting your site as much as possible?

Content is king, and establishing a concrete blog strategy will help in multiple ways. For one, this strategy will help you include more targeted keywords in your content, thus giving internet users more potential entry points to your site via search engines. Similarly, it will provide a space on your website for content that doesn’t fit on other pages elsewhere.

To streamline your blog strategy, we recommend a few things: the first is having a blog content calendar so that your posting schedule is optimally organized, and the second is creating a system where the quality of blog posts is high. Much of the foundational work for the latter is the same as it is for any medium of writing — having an organized outline prior to starting the writing process, for example, as opposed to just diving in with your thoughts disheveled. But it’s also worth examining whether you (or a colleague) have the ability to consistently write well and with the style you want your blog to take. If the answer’s no, then it’s a good idea to hire an outside writer to do so. Yeah, we know, that means an added expense, but in the long term it’s a net positive: not only do low-quality blog posts perform worse in content marketing but, from a human element, poor public-facing content makes your brand appear less professional and reliable. So, if you’d benefit from hiring a writer, it’s an investment we recommend — we do it too! Our writer’s the best, and we’re not just saying that because she’s the one controlling what words go in this blog right now, like “writers” and “are” and “super duper great.”

Examine potential technical optimizations

Sometimes there are improvements to make that aren’t apparent on the surface. These can include slow site loading time, broken links, sitemap errors, redirect chains, and more.

For the first example of slow loading times, one of the most common opportunities we see for improvement is in compressing images, choosing better image files, and deferring non-essential scripts until the page has fully loaded. Site loading time has numerous implications, not in the least the fact that it’s a direct ranking factor for Google. Fast loading time equals a higher ranking, which equals Google putting more eyeballs on your site. Coupled with that, there’s a direct correlation between slow loading times and users abandoning your site — and it doesn’t take long to reach that threshold. There are various thoughts on this, but both the data and corresponding opinions agree: two seconds or less is acceptable, three seconds is pushing it, and more than four seconds means you’re losing a significant amount of users. This is particularly impactful for mobile users, 53% of whom will abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a handy tool to help you improve your site’s performance here, specifically for finding technical ways to optimize site load time and comparing that with Google Analytics’ page load speed data.

Look into Google Search Console

This is related to auditing and technical updating. That’s because Google Search Console is another tool that can reveal areas for technical and content SEO improvement.

For subpar technical performance, Google Search Console can uncover broken links, submit XML sitemaps, disavow backlinks from spam sources, or manually request indexing of a page or domain. The latter is especially helpful for when you’ve redone parts or all of your site. And, for those with more advanced experience with Google Search Console, you can also use it to control indexing of certain URL parameters, but it’s worth disclaiming that in the process non-advanced users attempting this risk accidentally losing out on valuable site traffic.

For content and analytics, this can also help you see organic search performance over time with additional metrics otherwise unavailable in just Google Analytics. You can also use it to see a keyword’s increase or decrease in traffic over time and get specific steps to improve mobile optimization on a user experience level.

Brainstorm and work together to figure out new goals

When our crew at Fujisan is stumped, a big old internal brainstorm huddle is one of our go-to ways to come up with new ideas. This might seem kind of corny or too basic to feel like it belongs here, but it’s not an uncommon occurrence for groups to take for granted an assumption that they’ve done all they can when, in reality, there’s plenty more angles to look from. This works for coming up with both new content and new metrics to emphasize.

If your site is hitting all its targets, the latter becomes a useful angle; what are other facets of its performance to track? For example, if you’re tracking completed form submissions, how about also tracking form abandonment, too? For cases like this, we like using Google Tag Manager to track on-page events and goals related thereto.

After metrics targets, content is where you get to have fun. After all, if you’re running a blog for example, there’s no way you’ve covered every possible blip of relevant information. Even if you think your blog’s covered it all, there’s always something else. Have everyone in your team come up with at least one idea. While you probably won’t use each one, the value is still there — when one person feels like their brain has no more elasticity to get unstuck from a rut, the power of different perspectives mean you’re able to end up with a load of different angles and thoughts. Even if an idea isn’t rock solid from the beginning, it can help trigger a cascade of other ideas to unstick everything and get the content rolling again. Then, voila! More content is ready to go!

Learn something new

If there’s only one thing we know, it’s that nothing exists in a silo. SEO is no exception. So, not only is this a good thing to remember for SEO purposes, it’s just an all-around great reminder. If you ever feel completely stumped, learn more about adjacent subjects. Whether you’re at an agency or in-house, spend some time with some of the company’s other teams like UX, web dev, or paid media. Either way you’ll learn about a new subject and give your creative thinking a boost. And, if it makes sense in your context, you could also apply this to work on a joint initiative between multiple teams.

In the end, there’s always something that can be improved upon — you might just have to think outside the box to figure out what. And when all else fails, we at Fujisan are happy to help get things kick-started.