I’m often getting request from clients to take a look at specific area of their website, where for some reason they may not be getting as much traffic as they would like. There are many great search engine optimization strategies you can use for single pages or sections of your site but thinking this way neglects the more important fundamentals of SEO.

Diagnosing an SEO problem can be tricky and often looks like throwing darts with a blind fold on. Usually you can draw on past experience and try to make an educated guess on what’s wrong. This makes it a little easier to narrow down the problem but it always ends up with trying something and then having to wait and see if Google reacts. If nothing happens you’ve at least ruled out a few things and can narrow your focus but it can be a repetitive process.

So if you’ve found a problem on a section of your site, it can be easy to fall into the rut of “well let’s try that thing that worked last time,” rather than investigating and getting to the root of the problem. It can be easy to get fixated on a symptom and lose sight of the real problem that’s actually causing that symptom.

Any time you have a problem with one section of your site it’s important to do a full checkup. Search engines take into account your entire site when ranking it, so if something is wrong in one section it could still seriously affect another completely separate section.

Original article about diagnosing SEO problems posted on Wikimotive's blog under the title Diagnosing Your SEO Problem Properly