Three Signs You Need an SEO Makeover

It may be time to give your site a little sparkle.

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Search engine optimization (SEO), or the practice of making your site as searchable as possible, is more of an art than a science. There are ways to get your site ranked, and there are ways to get your site punished—but they aren't always black and white.

How do you know when it's time to give your site an SEO audit and potential makeover? Here are a few signs that it may be time to clean some things up, outsource your SEO, or rework some of your webpages. Just because your SEO isn't working as well as you wish doesn't mean things are hopeless. But how can you tell that things need to change?

Your site isn't ranked as high as you wish it were. This is the easiest SEO test you can perform. Just Google some topics that you would hope would bring shoppers to your site, like Software engineers in Dallas or cozy handmade socks. Is your site within the first page or two? If you're buried in the fifth or sixth Google page—or worse, unable to be found at all—it's probably time to make some adjustments on your site. Shoppers are rarely going to dig through pages and pages of Google before deciding what they want to purchase. It's important to be near the top.

You aren't receiving any links back to your site. If your content marketing strategy is working well, others will be finding your content and sharing it, whether on social media or their own websites. If nobody's sharing your content, that may be a sign that it either isn't resonating with your audience or it isn't being found easily by them. For instance, if you're a makeup artist and you have a blogpost about the five new ways to utilize highlighter, you'd hope that someone googling "how can I use my highlighter?" would bring them to your website due to your SEO.

You have a high bounce back rate. When someone arrives on your site and quickly leaves, it can be for a number of reasons—and none of them good. The first answer is that your website isn't loading quickly enough or is having technological problems, leading people to become frustrated and leave. The second is that people aren't getting what they expected to receive when they clicked onto your website, meaning that whatever they searched for didn't line up with what they found. Both of these issues can be fixed with an SEO makeover.