Why You Don’t Just Need White Hat SEO, but Customized Strategies

1. Why You Don’t Just Need White Hat SEO, but Customized Strategies White hat SEO techniques are safe and approved by Google, but you need to go beyond standardized strategies and adopt some customization for success. Most webmasters are aware of white hat and black hat SEO techniques. But when it comes to website marketing, it isn’t just black hat techniques you need to avoid. Black hat techniques are those frowned upon by Google and which you need to absolutely avoid. White hat techniques, on the other hand, are the safe ones that won’t pose any issues when adopted, right? Well, here’s some surprising news – not all white hat techniques are right or beneficial for your business! This knowledge is what separates the efficient SEO professionals from the others. So though Google doesn’t penalize all white hat techniques, not all of them are what you need to adopt. Sometimes you have gray hat techniques that really aren’t evil, but not good too. So here’s an eye- opener on the safe strategies that don’t necessarily give you any advantage. Algorithm Updates Not Always Responsible for Traffic Drops

2. SEO professionals keep monitoring the performance of their clients’ websites. Sometimes you could see ranking fluctuations. And the natural instinct is to blame it on algorithm changes. Drops in performance can happen due to updates Google makes in its algorithm, and nowadays it happens quite frequently. But they may not always be responsible for your ranking or traffic drops. So it’s important to do a proper investigation before you blame it on Google’s updates. There could be technical issues with your website, or your content might have undergone a major change. Your competitors could have done a better job than you, or new competitors could have come up. Besides, rankings and traffic can also be seasonal, depending on the topic your website is dealing with. A thorough investigation must be conducted to see if your website hasn’t gone through these factors, before zeroing in on an update. And it’s also important not to panic because lost rankings and traffic could return. But don’t make knee- jerk changes that could do more damage than good. Google has suggested various recovery methods to get back from a rankings or traffic drop. No Standard One-Size-Fits-All Strategy Following a standard SEO strategy is another technique that must be avoided. Of course, there are SEO best practices that are generally applicable to all websites. But they need to be customized to the requirements of your business. Following a fixed strategy may initially give you the performance, but you will reach a plateau. For growth, you need to figure out how your website can provide unique value to your audience. You will need to study your direct competitors’ strategies, or what their top performing content is. When you study the content strategies of your competitors, you could find some area they haven’t exploited which you can capitalize on. Through more content production you could get to the top. Though it consumes a lot of time, it is well worth the effort. Content quality is what Google values the most. Automated Auditing Tools Don’t Give the Complete Picture You need to be cautious about totally depending on automated tools for auditing. That’s because they don’t necessarily cover all the bases. Your business has specific requirements with regard to your target audience and perhaps certain obstacles too that Google faces in crawling your site and interpreting it. With automated tools you also don’t get any idea as to whether your internal linking structure allows for entity optimization.

3. You can instead make use of visualization tools for analyzing site structure and also more holistic auditing tools such as Sitebulb and Screaming Frog. Automated tools won’t give you the complete picture. Standard Content for All Location Pages Hampers Results Finally, we mention something we’ve discussed in another blog about your location page. If you’re a large business with multiple locations, you need unique content for each of those location pages rather than copying the content from one location page and pasting it to the others. The audience and search engine must see the uniqueness of each of your locations. That helps you get higher local rankings and even get to the SERP Maps Pack for local or geo-targeted searches. It is time-consuming to write unique copy for every location page, but you will see the results. The bottom-line is that you need a customized strategy for your business. It isn’t enough that you don’t use black hat techniques that could penalize you, but you need white hat methods fully customized to give value to your audience and reach them in areas where your competitors haven’t quite managed to. That’s what efficient digital marketing is all about.