Of all the actions we took I am convinced that the content audit was most effective. Every site is different and receives penalties for different reasons. But as Google’s updates constantly focus on content quality, I’d say this is the best place to start recovering from a penalty. We have only seen one SEO penalty over the years, on a site we had recently taken on. This site had a lot of over-optimized and repetitive blog articles, and a lot of spammy links. After discussing this with the developers, we found the website had been hacked.

The Only 3 Content Management Systems You Need to Know

You can then take the necessary actions, such as contacting the web admin or reporting the site to gain back your traffic. FAQFox is a free SEO tool that can scrape the Internet for questions your target audience might be asking or searching. Input a keyword, and this tool shows you a score from zero to 100 that tells you how competitive the keyword is.

Check Your Presence in SERP Features

Also in Google Search Console, check the Enhancements section – it will list any detected schema types (like FAQ, Breadcrumbs, Products) and if there are errors or warnings in them. If you find that none of your pages have structured data, that’s a strong recommendation to implement relevant schema. For example, sites that implement schema often see increased click-through rates because of rich snippets. One study by Search Engine Land noted a 20-30% increase in CTR for pages with structured data generating rich results (like review stars). While I won’t claim schema will magically SEO Anomaly boost your rankings, it does make your existing rankings more effective by making them stand out. Off-page SEO, primarily your backlink profile, is the next critical area.

Remember this alt text will also be the anchor text for your featured images. So I would recommend just using your “main” keyword for each of them. Which is Googler speak for “makes them rank higher for that keyword”. Take the time to make each title and meta description as “clickable” as possible. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly interested in grabbing search traffic for a privacy policy.

• Often, it’s a suspicious backlink, but other times, it’s not a fair penalty.
• Here, you’ll see the report containing mobile pages with issues.
• Each subsequent website review will build on the last and typically takes much less time to execute.
• You should also regularly review Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report to see how many pages Google crawls per day.

If I notice visitors aren’t staying on a site for long, or I see a lot of abandoned shopping carts — a website audit is a great way to find out why. I’d start with a website auditing tool to help analyze how my site is performing. This can help test various important facets of a site and then provide specific recommendations.