Without focusing on the SEO of your small business website, you won’t be able to withstand the fierce competition over the web. Search engine optimization improves different aspects of your website to achieve top ranking in the search engine result pages. Over the past few years, SEO has matured, and webmasters must struggle to keep up with the SEO guidelines and prevent their sites from negative SEO attacks. If you are unaware of how your website’s SEO can get hurt and your rankings decline, then you must read this blog until the end. Here, we will share the tips to protect your small business from negative SEO attacks. Let’s delve into it without any further delay!
Remove Low-Quality Backlinks
Gone are the days when purchasing low-quality backlinks improved the search engine rankings of websites. Today, Google bots have become smart enough to differentiate between low-quality and high-quality backlinks. To save your small business from a negative SEO attack, you should audit the quality of backlinks linking to your site. You’ll come across various incoming links from low authoritative sites during this audit. You should remove these backlinks to save your business site from getting blacklisted or losing rankings. Backlinks are an integral part of any SEO strategy; hence, you must check their quality, as low-quality backlinks are considered harmful from SEO’s perspective.
Use Unique Content on Your Website
Content is undoubtedly the king in the web world, as it has the power to make or break any website. Google and other search engines admire ranking sites with high-quality and unique content. Therefore, you must ensure uniqueness in your content before getting it live on your website. If your website is caught with plagiarized content, it will be on the verge of welcoming a negative SEO attack. To prevent yourself from this nuisance, you need to ensure the uniqueness of the content using a plagiarism checker. If plagiarism is found, make your content unique before using it.
Also Read : The Art of Guest Posting: How to Write a Guest Post and Get Your Content Seen
Take Care of the Images’ Size
Do you know that most users don’t wait more than 3 to 5 seconds for a website to get loaded? The sites taking longer than 5 seconds end up with an increased bounce-back rate, which is a negative SEO factor. The root cause behind this nuisance is the load on a website’s server due to large-sized images. You must deal with this problem and always upload optimized and compressed images on your business’ site to prevent the increased bounce-back rate. It is also necessary to bring your images in the preferred format for the web, like JPG. If the elements on your website aren’t heavy, it will not take much to load; hence, your site will be saved from negative SEO attacks.
Optimal Keyword Density
Undoubtedly, keywords are also an integral part of an SEO strategy, but the tactics of over-stuffing keywords should be avoided at any cause. A few years back, SEOs used to implement the keyword stuffing technique to boost their site’s rankings. However, now it is considered a black hat SEO technique, and the sites implementing it have to face the wrath of negative SEO. You may have heard that using keywords is no more essential. However, it’s not true, as your website won’t be matched with users’ queries and presented in the search engine result pages if it doesn’t contain the right keywords. The best strategy in this scenario is to keep an optimal keyword density.
Conduct Mobile-Friendly Test
Today, most internet users access websites through mobile devices instead of desktops and laptops. Google’s recent update also sheds light on mobile-first indexing, which means that mobile-friendly sites are ranked above those that are not. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it can suffer a loss in rankings. Therefore, you should conduct a mobile-friendly test on your site and keep it properly optimized for all mobile devices. The sites compatible with all operating systems boost rankings on the SERP.
Check for Other Technical SEO Issues
Your small business’ site can receive a negative SEO attack if it contains technical SEO issues, such as broken links and improper functioning of the site’s navigation map. You should look into such technical aspects of your sites regularly and fix these issues before they start hurting your overall SEO efforts. If your audience comes across such issues on your site, it will create a negative impression in their minds. Search engines rank those sites offering the best user experience to their visitors. The existence of such issues in your site will never let you outrank others and prevent yourself from negative SEO attacks.
