Our On Page SEO Works were not very effective

[lesseo]

Hello; We have been doing SEO work for a Saas Project competing globally for about a year.

- Sitemap was incorrect (we fixed it.)
- There were too many 404s (we fixed them all.)
- There were unnecessary content that was far from the main goal of the site. There were a few visitors here, but it was not relevant to our target audience. (We removed all unnecessary content.)
- We rewrote all existing content according to user intent.
- We completely rewrote the content to strengthen readability.

Note: We also worked on backlinks, although not aggressively.

Result: Although there was an increase in rankings for some important keywords, it is still far from our goals. We came to the first page with only a 3-word keyword.

Apart from that, our impression rates and click rates are almost the same.

When we look at these results, I think Google does not care much about the work we did for Onpage.

From now on, I am thinking of working on getting backlinks through guest writing. Do you have any recommendations?

[not2easy]

You do not mention the timeframe of the work. Even if your work was successful, it would not instantly move up the charts. Guest articles are not the ideal way to get the word out, those kinds of backlinks are seen as efforts to gain backlinks and can work against your on-page efforts. The combination of changes needs some wait and see time between decision making.

There were too many 404s (we fixed them all.)

When you say you fixed them all, does that mean you removed all links to the 404 URLs? There are right and wrong ways to fix 404s, so it helps when they are handled correctly and can cause more problems when the 404 URLs redirect to different content.

[lesseo]

Thanks for the answer.

We actually structured the 404 error pages. In other words, there were already existing pages, we redirected them to more relevant pages. We redirected the pages that gave errors to the home page with software.

Do you think adding articles as a guest writer on authoritative and high-hit pages and getting links from them seems like an artificial effort?

I'm not talking about ordinary, unhittable and domain authority paid promotional articles. I don't get links from such sites.

[not2easy]

Redirecting to the home page does not resolve a 404, it just becomes what Google calls a "soft 404" which is a worse outcome than a 404. Google thinks if they send someone to an URL that person should get to see the content they were searching for, not the home page.They were sent to that URL because of their search.

[lesseo]

Yes, but I mentioned in the previous article that we do not direct every content to the home page. The content we direct to the home page were leftover pages that would not make sense to direct to other pages. There was no problem with that anyway.

[not2easy]

When you redirect old content to the home page it does affect your ranking, there are hundreds of such cases in various threads here. It is better to serve a 404 for pages that do not exist anymore rather than serve people something they did not ask for.

Or your 404 page can be customized to offer alternatives, that is another response.

[aristotle]

As not2easy said, you should remove all the links to those old 404 pages, then remove the pages from the site and the sitemap.

[lesseo]

Hey man I guess I can't explain.

There are no pages on the site that give 404 errors right now. There are none on the Sitemap. Also, these are not directed to the Home page.
I'm asking something else but the answer I get is the 404 facts that were known 10 years ago. We don't have a problem with 404 anyway.

[ankit68]

Well done lesseo, you have worked really hard I can tell. It’s not always a good idea to automatically forward our 404 pages to the home page since a custom 404 page may be the best solution. Guest blogging is a great idea all in all, just make sure the sites are credible!

[lesseo]

Thanks for the reply ankit68

[tangor]

Guest blogging has been deprecated ... it doesn't work like it did 10 years ago.

If a link is redirected in anyway to avoid a 404 MAKE SURE THAT IS THE BEST METHOD! In most regards a 404 (or thousands of them) are not a problem as there is NO INTENT to deceive the USER ... the content is simply not there.

LInks/URLS are NOT "on page SEO".

You didn't say, but any part of this site contain UGC (user generated content)? Reason why I ask is it seems topic drift and intent on the site changed and had to be muscled back to original goals. Just asking!

[lesseo]

tangor +
I understood very well what you meant about tangor 404. and it was very clear to me. Now I have more ideas for 404 pages, thank you.

Actually, the website I work on is a Saas Project. It is a 4-year-old website and I have been working on it for the last 1 year.

We worked a lot in the OnPage area (maybe at least 4 months). The content was previously shifting to different topics, that is, it was far from its main goal and there were unnecessary content. I removed them. These contents were not written by users, but by content writers who wrote content on the site.

I think I did little in the OffPage area and I blame myself. I cannot buy many links because the prices are very high in its sector. I tried to create natural backlinks in 1 year but unfortunately I could not make much progress.

The only thing I could achieve;

I put free in front of 1 of the 2 keywords and increased it from rank 80 to rank 7.

However, our competitor website has 15 times more backlinks than us (90% of them are spam comments and forum backlinks, the remaining 10% are promotional articles) and is currently in 3rd place for 2 keywords.

Finally, do you think that guest content and links from here are no longer very useful? Is there a reading for this? I can research it.

Thank you very much for your interest. Your answers were very useful for me.