When To Shoot Your SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Copyblogger had a great post on when the right time is to kill your blog. It gave me a great idea.

I’m not advocating murder here. I’m talking about your SEO campaigns. When should you put a bullet in their heads and just start over?

Sometimes it isn’t working and you know it isn’t working. So what should you do? You know you should keep plugging away, but your current direction is all wrong. It’s time to pull the plug. You just know it.

Here is a list of times when it might be prudent to just pull the plug on your search engine optimization campaign and go back to the drawing board:

• You find yourself ranking for all the wrong keywords – I’m not talking about hitting No. 1 unexpectedly for a few keywords you hadn’t planned for. I’m talking about your No. 1 rankings being for keywords that are all wrong for your business. They’re good keywords – they’re just not right for your business. And the keywords you should be ranking for, you’re not. You’ve obviously gone in the wrong direction. Time to start over.
• You’re ranking well but you aren’t getting any traffic – OK, you may not need to start over, but you definitely need to work on your meta tags. Is your description being used as the snippet? What is? Take a good look at your on-page content and see if you can make any improvements.
• You’ve run out of money and you aren’t make any either – You’ve likely hit a brick wall. Something isn’t working. You either need to go back for more seed money or pick another niche. It’s OK, all of us fall flat on our faces from time to time.
• You’ve totally lost interest – It happens. You thought it was a good idea when you started but you’re no longer interested. You probably chose the wrong topic to begin with. Go back to the beginning and try to find something you’re really interested in.

Rarely would I suggest just trashing everything and starting over. But sometimes it’s the right thing to do. If you find yourself in a tough SEO spot and need a way out, consider killing your SEO as a last resort.