- How to examine where a site has lost visibility - Capturing the right information to maintain leading results - What causes common SEO issues and how to remedy them - Which tools work the best for diagnosing SEO issues quickly

1. SEO for the Skilled Mechanic
Asaad Dookhy

2. Introduction
• The aim of this presentation is highlight the ways you can
diagnose a loss of visibility, create actions and communicate your
plan
• I’m the SEO Lead at Decathlon UK (Decathlon is a sports retailer,
we sell over 70 sports, in 26 countries/ 100s of stores worldwide)
• My Twitter is @29Asaad
• I love football :)

3. 1. Diagnosing a Loss Of Visibility

4. Top Level View
Searchmetrics
GA

5. Where Has The Loss Occurred
Use tags in Searchmetrics to discover the areas of your site hit

6. Use GWT impression data to support Searchmetrics data

7. Use keyword rankings data (I use SEO Rank Monitor)
Then segment by tag group so you can see the biggest losses in
rankings. If rankings are stable then look at the search volumes to
see if there’s a dip in popularity

8. Look into your brand terms using the Google keyword Tools and
filtering your brand in GWT to see if your brand is losing popularity

9. Look at your mobile traffic and rankings

10. Check Analytics annotations to check if any work on the site has
potentially caused an issue

11. Questions Answered:
• Overall loss in traffic and visibility
• Areas of the site most effected
• Has brand played a part
• Device most effected

12. Algorithm Changes
Use The Panguin Tool to see any dips around algorithm updates

13. Break out known factors of the updates into a checklist, the two
articles below can help:
- themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html
- hiswebmarketing.com/penguin-not-just-about-bad-links/

14. Questions Answered:
• Has your site been effected by an update
• Which elements of the update are you guilty of

15. Loss of Links
Use Ahrefs to see your lost links over time

16. Possible Reasons Why You Have Lost Links:
• End of partnerships
• Earned links pushed down sites because of new content
produced
• Website owner decided to change the link

17. Create a pie chart of the areas of your site which have lost the most
links & see it it correlates to where the loss of visibility is

18. Question Answered:
• Can you correlate your loss of links to a loss of visibility

19. 2. The Competition

20. Use Searchmetrics & Similar Web to monitor competitor visibility

21. Content
Use Wayback Machine to see if they have improved content
and design on key landing pages

22. Technical SEO
Audit competitors with Screaming Frog to see if they have
improved on 404 pages, incorrect redirects, page sizes, missing
title tags etc.

23. Link Acquisition
Use Majestic SEO to see their link acquisition improvements

24. Company News
• Check for press releases
• Staff updates on LinkedIn

25. Questions Answered:
• Is it just me or is this a dip industry wide
• Which competitor has benefited most from your dip
• Areas your competitors have improved on and how this
could see them benefit from the latest updates
• Which areas of improvement you should look to
prioritise

26. 3. Adapting To Change

27. List how you compare with your competitors with regards to the
most important recent changes

28. Question Answered:
• Where you fall behind which will affect your overall SEO
performance

29. 4. Quick Technical Checks

30. Quick Technical Checks
• Make sure you’re not blocking any URLs by accident in
Robots.txt
• Use GWT to see if a rise in 404 pages, investigate why and
correct
• Make sure no redirects are 302 instead of 301 redirects
• Check canonical URLS are correct
• Cannibalisation of content – check if the correct page is
ranking and not the weaker page which then drops
• Use GWT to see if there’s drop in indexed pages

31. 5. Fixing It

32. Context
You know the areas of the site affected and reasons so
you can put together an action plan:
For example If Panda then perform X, if Penguin perform
Y etc.
(It is likely to be a combination of factors)

33. Resources
• Interns to fix errors at scale
• Copywriters + designers for content improvements
• Tech to make the technical changes required
• An agency to make a full link audit and recommendations
• PPC to cover the loss of organic visibility
• Give yourself the biggest possible timeframe
Fundamentally you need more budget and time

34. Takeaways
• Where has your site lost visibility
• The likely reasons
• How have your competitors benefited
• How to fix it

35. The End