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Homepage and CMS SEO settings affect how search engines interpret the most important page on a business website.
Look at this horror SEO story that happened with one of my clients. We've been dealing with this company for over five years. We have done so well for them in SEO terms, they're literally ranking for thousands and thousands of words and most of their traffic and their online sales come from organic traffic.
Now the other day one of the directors called me in a panic.
They said, Josh, something is very wrong. In the last week, none of our results are coming up on organic results. Can you please investigate what is going on?
Now I went and spent a few hours on the back end of this website.
It's quite a complicated website. It's not built on WordPress or Shopify. It took us a lot of time to build the SEO correctly.
So it also took a few hours to try investigate and try work out what happened.
This is what happened that a junior guy in the team that was working on the website, somehow this guy had watched something or had spoken to someone and he thought, you know what, something is not right with our page titles. I'm gonna change it with regards to the template on SEO and also with regards to our site map. I think I must make some changes because things don't look right to him.
Now this guy has been at the company for a few months.
He knows almost Zero about SEO. So I'm almost confident that my 15 year old son knows more about SEO. Than he does.
Nonetheless, he made these changes.
He submitted one or two things and bang, look what has happened in the last month because they made that sitemap change alone. They've dropped 30,000 keywords from the SEO index. That is massive.
And you can see obviously how much the organic traffic is dropping and it's starting to drop and also how many pages are indexed.
Thank god I managed to sort out the problem and I know how to reverse it. I'm hoping and praying that Google can reindex the stuff and the damage isn't too severe. I think this is just a lesson and I've seen this so many times.
Number one, let the experts do the SEO.
Work for you. Don't let juniors do it. Don't let people that think they know a little bit about SEO.
Make any changes for you.
Secondly and most importantly, trust your SEO. Team to do the work for you.
Homepage and CMS SEO settings affect how search engines interpret the most important page on a business website.
Audit each CMS homepage title, meta description, SEO plugin setup, and duplicate-plugin risk before treating the site as technically ready.
This source is connected to WordPress and website SEO settings.
This is what happened that a junior guy in the team that was working on the website, somehow this guy had watched something or had spoken to someone and he thought, you know what, something is not right with our page titles.