Internet Marketing Ninjas' Chris Boggs Explains Reactive SEO

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi my name is John rampton I'm with search engine Journal I'm here with Chris bogs and today we're going to be talking about reactive SEO can you uh uh also Chris you're from internet marketing ninjas that's correct I'm the chief operating and marketing officer of internet marketing ninjas I've been there since uh early February I'm also chairman of Seno which is the uh nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting awareness and search oh excellent perfect um tell us a little bit about reactive SEO what is it what should people know about it and what can small to medium-sized businesses be be doing better to be more reactive about their SEO efforts great well you know reactive let's put aside everything that you want to proactively do for SEO for a moment but re really typically reactive SEO is based on unfortunately bad news that you may receive in in the form of uh suddenly lower traffic uh for core terms to your business um from a especially non-branded uh search organic search perspective right so the first thing that you have to do and and I actually wrote a blog post on this where there's an acronym called prepare uh unfortunately I'm not prepared to uh give you what each of those are but it probably would get boring anyway but main point is is that you have to have uh a plan in place uh to be able to immediately address SEO what uh SEO concerns one of the big ones that people forget about and and if you can as a business if you can have a little bit of a rainy day for paid search perhaps one of the very first things you should do is is to consider recouping the Lost traffic immediately through paid means while you're doing a little bit of uh postmortem or or hopefully just uh hopefully it's not postmortem yet right but uh reactive is then basically made up of uh a simple process simple uh is is a relative term of course but a process of understanding where the issue lies identifying who can control a change to that issue and then effectively implementing uh that change uh as quickly as possible uh and then at that point you'll want to use the tools available to you such as Google Web Master tools or Bing W Master Tools in order to ensure that whatever changes or updates that you've made uh can can stick so that that's the 50,000 foot level I mean if if you look at it in a little bit more detail you know again those tools that you have uh Google Web Master and Bing Web Master tools um as well as some of the other tools maybe you're using an Enterprise level tool like uh bright Edge or search metrics or something like like that um or um your analytics tell you that something's wrong you know the first thing to do is to try to put a point on it often what you'll find uh in most cases is that there's something that you can isolate as being the main issue so in order to react properly you have to make sure that you're reacting effectively and and I think surgically right uh sometimes you can overreact and uh undo things that may be working uh and just because you're simply trying to oh my god let's let's fix something when something's broken let's turn everything off right so uh you know the the thing that I would say there is that uh when you are doing that analysis and and identifying exactly the core root of the issue uh to make sure that that you understand that it's likely going to be isolated to a particular area of the website or it could be isolated to something that's technical or content or linking right very rarely have I found that a reactive SEO situation occurs uh as a result of a variety of things that have gone wrong at so primarily you'd say it's just in one area of website right and then uh you know if it's technical for example uh it this depends now if you're an in-house person you may have the ability to quicker Implement changes you may not have the ability you know we get into these uh not arguments but discussions uh in SEO all the time with it teams and developers and and designers in terms of the way that stuff is built and sometimes maybe being in a non-friendly manner or updated in a non search friendly friend L manner uh keeping that line of communication open is very important right the best way that you're going to react effectively to an SEO mess up is to have the right people that you can call up and say hey I think your team may have done something wrong when they reset the site maybe they reset the robot's text file and and I need your help on this can you help me right because otherwise uh depending on how large the organization you're working within or if you're in an agency setting and you you're already a couple uh you know layers away of communication it could take a little while to even get stuff implemented right so keeping friends taking people out to lunch every once in a while exactly uh just to keep that uh so for the the rainy day uh that you can call on the favor uh that's an important part of reactive SEO is to know who your go-to people are going to be I think yeah okay well thank you very much for talking with me today again I'm John rampton this is Chris bogs and we're here with the search engine Journal hey also if you have any questions for Chris or myself please put him in the comments below and we'll try and get to them [Music] thanks