Don't panic. Take action. An Avenue A | Razorfish SEM account director explains.
It's pretty much guaranteed that, at one time or another, you will settle in at your desk with your morning coffee and decide to check a few of your search engine listings, only to find that your site has suffered a drop in rankings. When this happens, what is the first thing you should do?
The first thing you will probably want to do is clean up the coffee you just spit all over your screen, but then what? This is always frustrating, but taking the following steps may help you resolve the situation pretty quickly and without much loss in traffic.
Does it matter?
While nobody likes to see ranking drops, the more important statistic to look at is traffic and conversion. Oftentimes, people get hung up on ranking for "ego" words that have high visibility but may not be the best conversion drivers. If you look at your traffic and find that while rankings have fallen your organic conversions have grown or stayed steady, then this may not be a huge issue. But let's say that's not the case.
Determine what has changed
First, it's always a good idea to check your previous baseline (presuming you have one) and work from that to determine what keywords have dropped, and the severity of the drop. If there are only a few keywords that have dropped, or your rankings have only moved down one or two spots, then you're probably just experiencing some fluctuation between data centers.
It's also important to review where your competitors rank (again presumably you have a baseline for this as well). When I say competitors I don't just mean direct competitors, but also keyword competitors. For example, an airline may view its competitors as other airlines, but online it competes for keywords with aggregator sites such as Travelocity and Expedia.
If your competitors are also suffering a loss it may mean that there are new sites competing in your keyword segment. If this is the case you should add them to your list of competitors and begin to track their rankings. Another possibility is that the change in the algorithm is affecting sites that have characteristics particular to your industry. For example, a search engine may give favor to its own news delivery that is taking ranking from other news sites.
Is the drop consistent across data centers?
In this example, let's say you've checked out the competitor question and you've determined that the keyword drop is isolated to just your site. A good first step is to get some other people to perform the same searches you did, which is even better if you have access to people working in different parts of the country.
In light of changes with Universal and Personalized search, you may even want to ask some friends who have not been on your site to perform these searches as well. There are hundreds of data centers you could possibly hit when performing a search, so what you are seeing may not be what others are seeing. It's quite possible that you are hitting a data center that is being used for testing algorithm changes.
Is your site the problem?
If you've continued to read to this point, then you have determined that your site is the only one that has suffered, and it's consistent across multiple data centers. While it's always easiest to assume changes in the search engine algorithm, more often than not something changed on your site that either you weren't aware of, or you didn't think had an SEO implication. Server changes, redirect updates, Custom 404 pages, URL rewriting, and code optimization can all have potentially harmful effects on search engine rankings.
I have seen a client's organic traffic decrease by as much as 30 percent because it didn't think of SEO when making changes to its site. For example, a print page feature, while very useful, can essentially create a duplicate of every page on your site if not implemented with SEO in mind.
In my experience, the marketing contacts I deal with don't get a full picture of the work that is happening behind the scenes on their sites. While this is a good thing in most instances, you still need to be aware of changes to the site because of their SEO implications. It's always a good idea to include your SEO experts on any site development to avoid any infractions. While it may be frustrating to add another person into the mix when trying to complete a project on a tight deadline, the potential for loss of traffic and revenue, not to mention the additional time that will be needed to resolve the issue, should be incentive enough to consider utilizing your SEO experts.
What if nothing on your site has changed?
If at this point you still haven't isolated the issue, then now is the time you can curse the search engines and check the SEO blogs. There are many sites that are great resources to keep informed with the updates to the search engines. Things to check for are algorithm updates or index updates. Oftentimes, index updates don't completely unfold for a few weeks, so if it's an index or algorithm update, it's best to wait a little bit before you panic. If after a few weeks the dust has settled and your rankings still don't look as good as they did, then you may have to make some changes to your site. At this point, the blogs will have better information as to what has changed with the index and what infractions your site may be causing.
A good understanding of your position in search results, and good communication between your web development team and your SEO experts, will help avoid or minimize your loss; so don't panic. There is always a reason for, and solution to, all search engine issues. Also, if you tend to have strong reactions to changes in your rankings, you may want to check them before you drink your coffee.
Ray Rosti is account director, SEM at Avenue A | Razorfish. Read full bio.
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