A sudden drop in rankings can mean a sudden drop in revenue – find out how SEO experts analyse Search Engine ranking problems.
When a company is not ranking well for keywords relevant to their business or worse still not even ranking for their company name, it is vital SEO experts are called upon to analyse the website and find out why it is occurring. As we always say SEO is not rocket science but when a website is experiencing significant rankings drops, it is best left to professionals who live and breathe SEO to diagnose Search Engine ranking problems.
Black hat SEO
Using black hat SEO techniques such as link farms, cloaking, doorway pages and keyword stuffing may work at the start and accelerate your accent up the Search Engine ladder but as retail giant JC Penney soon found out; you can quickly come unstuck by using unethical strategies. If your website suffers a rankings drop, one of the first things an SEO expert will do is ask whether of any strategies have been employed.
SEO experts suggested solution: Whatever you have done via black hat SEO techniques and that term is used loosely, needs to be undone and quickly. The sooner you come clean to your SEO experts, the sooner they can try and rectify the problem.
Website redesign
A website redesign can be the source of many Search Engine ranking problems if there are significant changes made to the URLs, the content, the internal link profile, the navigation structure or your website is now built using Flash, Ajax or JavaScript. You may have inadvertently overwritten the SEO work that has been done. If there have been changes, Search Engines will need time to crawl your site and re-index pages.
SEO experts suggested solution: When significant changes are planned for a website, work with SEO experts to minimise the problems associated with a redesign and have an SEO migration plan in place. Where possible, use 301 redirects but this is not always the ideal solution. Make sure you create and submit a valid XML Sitemap as soon as transition to new website has been done.
Link building profile
Link building is an important signal in Search Engine algorithms. Your link profile is one of the elements an SEO expert will examine when there is a fall in rankings. Search Engines look at the number of quality pages linking back to your website as validation that your website is trustworthy and credible. Here are some possible Search Engine ranking problems associated with link profiles:
- Not understanding the importance of back links and not focusing on a link building campaign at all.
- Changing website URLS which affects your link profile and other websites linking back to you.
- Receiving back links from bad neighbourhoods such as linking farms, pharmaceutical sites, gambling sites and porn sites.
- Only linking to a very select quantity of quality websites which can be risky if something happens to one of the sites and lead to a loss of inbound links.
- Linking to websites that have far too many links on one page diluting the link juice for each link.
SEO experts suggested solution: Diversify – this is the key for a natural, balanced and healthy link building profile. Do not rest on your rankings and continue to expand on your link building efforts from a variety of relevant, trustworthy, authoritative and credible websites.
Duplicate content
When analysing your website, SEO experts will have a look at the amount of duplicate content on your website. This may be pages replicated across your own website or other pages on the web. When Search Engines find pages they perceive to be similar, they will only serve the page that they believe represents the best value which may not be the preferred version. This may be why certain pages are not ranking.
SEO experts suggested solution: Ask your web developer to create URL rewrites so only a single URL exists for each product, create a robots.txt file in your root folder advising Search Engines what (duplicate) pages should not be indexed or specify a canonical URL for duplicated pages. If you are operating an ecommerce site, rewrite as much supplier’s content as possible.
Matt Cutts, Google’s Anti Web Spam Engineer talks about duplicate content and the best practice guidelines to avoid replicated content on your website in the following video:
On page optimisation
As well as duplicate body content (as above), duplicate content in on page optimisation can also be an issue and cause of Search Engine ranking problems. On page optimisation refers to the title tags, headings, meta description tags, image file names, image ALT text and so forth. The on page optimisation of each page should be unique and ideally each landing page on your website should be optimised for a relevant keyword.
SEO experts suggested solution: For larger sites such as ecommerce sites, this can be a complex problem. Start with your most important pages and begin to drill down to the least important ensuring each page has unique meta data.
Not enough patience
When you are launching a new website or you have created a new landing page, it takes time for it to rank on Search Engines. This will depend on the popularity of the keyword and the way the page is optimised – some pages will rank almost immediately and others may even take a few months. Before putting in a panic-stricken call to your SEO experts, wait a few weeks to months for your web pages to rank.
SEO experts suggested solution: Take up a hobby because watched rankings never rise, but seriously, if you need a page to be visible on Search Engines straight away, you may prefer to use pay per click advertising while you wait for the pages to rank on organic searches.
If you’re operating an ecommerce site and your rankings have taken a dramatic fall, contact the team at SEO Works immediately so they can analyse the underlying Search Engine ranking problems. Search Engines have become such an important driver of revenue that every day your website is not ranking, you are losing money – it’s best to bring in the SEO experts and get to the crux of the problem quickly and swiftly.
