What Happens When Your Website is Over-Optimised? A Deep Dive Into SEO Burnout
In the evolving SEO landscape, it can be difficult to not try too hard. Every website owner today knows how important it is to optimise your website to improve visibility and website traffic, but the question is, when is enough?
Over-optimisation is excessive adjustments that is made to your website to improve search engine rankings. This can be having an unnatural number of backlinks to overstuffing keywords. The misconception is that intensifying your SEO techniques will provide better results. Often, this can have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.
Over-optimisation can achieve negative results, making all your hard SEO efforts go to waste.
Some common things that can happen when your site is over-optimised includes:
Over-optimising your site can result in more losses than gains, harming your website position in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines have become smarter, and more sophisticated. They focus on user experience, along with relevant and high quality content. When detecting sites that are over-optimised for SEO, the algorithm will reduce their ranking.
There are common SEO strategies that are often over-optimised, which can negatively impact your SEO success:
Keyword stuffing was once the way to SEO success as marketers filled their content with targeted keywords to improve ranking. It was a manipulative tactic that has been ironed out by search algorithms. Keyword stuffing today is when you overload your website with keywords.
With the advancement of algorithms, these ploys are quickly detected and lowered in ranking. Keyword stuffing can reduce engagement and deter readers.
Backlinks are valuable in the SEO world when they are earned organically. If your website is overflowing with low-quality backlinks, it gives room for concern, as search engines value the quality of the backlink, over how many backlinks you have.
One backlink from a high domain authority website is worth its weight in gold, overshadowing numerous low-quality backlinks.
SEO has become more than making search engines happy. Today website owners need to focus on their website visitors, providing an excellent user experience (UX). Focusing on optimising your website without taking user experience into consideration is a major SEO mistake.
Complicated navigation to slow loading web pages can all result in a negative user experience, not to mention irrelevant or low-quality content.
While we understand over-optimisation may have been done with good intentions to improve your website, it can have undesirable outcomes. The consequences of over-optimising can affect your ranking in search results, along with user trust, and brand reputation.
Over-optimisation consequences can include:
In order to create a successful SEO strategy, you need to take care to avoid the risk of over-optimisation. While optimisation is essential to your SEO success, there are boundaries. The key to SEO success is user-centric strategies that cater to your target audience and search algorithms. If you struggling to manage your SEO strategy effectively and want to avoid the risk of over-optimisation, contact Genie Crawl. Contact us today and see what we can do to help you improve online visibility and reduce the risk of over-optimisation.
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