Ranking fluctuations from week to week
-
Over the past couple of months I have seen a couple of my campaigns have key phrases that change from week to week from being in the top 3 to being >51. I worked pretty hard on the sites to get them mostly #1 for their preferred key phrases, and haven't been working that hard lately, but not sure what to make of it. It looks as though those keyphrases that dropped this week to >51 will probably be back in the top 3. Makes it diffuclt when you are trying to prepare a report for your client.
Any suggestions are welcomed, and Happy New Year!
-
It does. I was sceptical when I was told that it had something to do with Moz Local. I'll take a look at the video - thanks for the suggestion!
-
So I want to suggest checking out the webinar we had yesterday on speeding up your website.
I also wanted to address your comment about your crawlers and localized rankings possibly messing up your rankings. This is not the case. The crawler that looks at your site in Moz Analytics is different from our rankings crawlers. They do not connect. They do not influence rankings as the bots only record the information in the SERPs based on your keywords; they don't click into your site. Does that make sense?
-
I went to a meetup last night that specifically talked about SEO, and although I wasn't given a good answer to this problem - and yes it continues - last week I had 30+ keywords improve by 48+ positions to #1 and this week I had 10+ drop to higher than 51, I'm told that this is not unusual (not convinced of that either) especially with the new "localized" feature of Moz.com, and that ranking scans might be run from anywhere in the country causing the fluctuations. This is the only site I'm seeing such dramatic swings so I'm sceptical. I just discovered that I still have a .png as my header image (discovered last night, and have been working to improve server response speed.
I'm hoping that I can get a good streamlined configuration for a caching plugin that will work "generally" for all my sites. I'm still open to suggestions and thanks for this one.
-
I can do that with my clients that are on shared service accounts for free, but not for my VPS clients - this one is shared, so good idea. I think I probably have some images that can be resized as well. I have the load speed on the home page down to 3 seconds, so getting there.
-
you may want to try out www.Cloudflare.com - They provide a free CDN which may give you a big boost in page speed with very little effort and it's free.
-
I have a client that has been trying a different plugin with huge success - compared directly to W3TC. I just haven't been convinced yet will try it and see.
-
I do think it's worth exploring other plug-ins and working in the nuts-and-bolts of site speed. Even though WP plug-ins are very helpful, it's always good to know the details of what's happening as much as possible. I'm not exactly sure how W3TC works -- I've never used it or any other site speed plug-ins personally for WP -- but it's possible it can't optimize everything or that it's working the best it or any plug-in can.
-
Thanks - I have been working to configure W3TC to improve page speed - only recently started working on it. And yeah - I overoptimized in the beginning and have started rethinking the content based upon what I've been reading lately. Will do - you think that page speed might be part of the problem? W3TC is one of the most highly recommended performance plugins, but I don't think it is as good as some of the new plugins recently released. Will search for a different one.
I appreciate the feedback - I'll see how things go next week.
-
Looking at your site, I noticed a couple things:
Your site speed is pretty slow. You can use pingdom.com to check your site speed. This is a great study by Jon Colman about site speed and how much it actually affects your site. I noticed that you're running WordPress, and here's some tips on how to speed up your WP site. Google definitely factors in speed, and this could be affecting how the bots reach your site (or don't reach it) and account for the flux week-to-week. You are correct in that it shouldn't be that dramatic of a change week-to-week.
I also noticed that your homepage was a little overly optimized for keywords. As search engines start getting more semantic, you want to optimize more for the user. Definitely don't kill all the keywords, but balance is the key. Read through the copy as a visitor, not just the SEO and industry expert.
-
The website is oztruckingandrigging.com. I've attached a link to the keyphrases that show a big drop - but I have just as many that went up by a significant amount. And it seems to be a weekly thing now. Very weird.
-
It would be great if you could leave your site URL and some examples of what you're looking to rank for so we could dig in.
Did you do any recent changes to your site that may account for ranking changes?
-
Good idea - I'll take a look. Yeah, seems like the last 3 months or so. I don't send my client reports every week, but still - weird they are bouncing so dramatically from week to week. If they dropped and then stayed there then I'd probably have more to go on.
-
What does the 'lately' time frame look include? It's important to note that Google has had a lot of algo. updates in the past 3 months. You could be witnessing SERP fluctuation due to any of these.
Have you checked out Google Webmaster Tools? See if those keyword terms are in the GWT reports and if the same fluctuation is present.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking Keyword
Hi! I am Amelia My site rank 5 keyword in united states show that Ahref's and I check in Moz but that shows 1 rank key word and Ahref's shows the 59 backlinks and Moz shows 5 to 6 backlink why that shows low keyword and backlinks that's my site problem or Moz issues. Check My website and tell me issues.
Moz Pro | | Oiebyut0 -
Why are my keyword rankings dramatically changing week to week?
I have a site (actual several) that has been up for many years now. Content is changed monthly - regularly. It would always rank in the top 5 positions for 5 or 6 keywords. Now all of a sudden (without any dramatic changes to the website) my ranking results from my weekly Moz reports are dramatically different from week to week - every week. One Keyword will be #1, then the next week it will drop 49 positions, the 3rd week it might be #5, then Not in the Top 50, then #1 again, and so and so on. This happens to all my keywords on my site. I was waiting for Google to finish it's changes to it's algorithms but it's now been long enough and I can't get a handle on what's happening, why it's happening, and what to do about it, and what direction to take with my SEO. My Traffic has actually improved over last year by approx. 25%, but I have also started a PPC campaign for this client. Any suggestions would be great.
Moz Pro | | SummitCom0 -
How To Ques. Getting ranked on page one for a keyword when you compete with bigger websites/companies/stores
Can David Beat Goliath. I work with small businesses with top products that are up against big brands and their online presence. If I am working with them to create content that meets the needs of all their stakeholders/customers/prospects to generate revenue I wonder if keyword targeting with content can really pay off to get them page one, #1 position ranking. So I ask you this question? How do you create a story for a small online store that can get ranked on page one for a keyword when you compete with bigger websites (or sites with higher domain authority)? I don't need all the basics, I'm just looking for a key insight or tip that you have found or heard is working for a David to beat a Goliath (and hold their position rank once they get highly ranked). We are up against sites - for viable keywords -who have higher domain authority and in some cases more content or link backs. Also, I've notice in situations when I do get to page one and I'm in position 7 MOZ analytics show low to no traffic coming from it? Yikes, what do I do to improve that? These are top keywords.
Moz Pro | | brandawakening0 -
Does SEOmoz tool provide me the option to track rankings for other search engines like google.co.uk?
I need to track rankings on search engines across different geographies. Does your tool provide the option to track rankings for search engines other than the ones used in US
Moz Pro | | zycus0 -
Rank Tracker report truble
Hello, I am new at SEOmoz, and I am having some troubles setting up my rank tracking report. Last week I set up e-mail notifications, but it hasn’t been delivered to this day. Can anybody tell me when do you usually receive the report via e-mail? Thank you.
Moz Pro | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Is it possible to see Ranking data for longer than one week at a time?
The weekly ranking data is great for short-term analysis, but it would be great to be able to see ranking data in aggregate across an entire month, or 3-month time span. Being able to track ranking fluctuations over that amount of time makes it easier to spot trends and mark changes to website plans and how they worked over time. It also makes it easier to spot visitor trends based on rankings with Google Analytics numbers for keywords that don't get a lot of traffic on a weekly basis. Anyways, I can't seem to find any way to see ranking numbers over a larger timespan other than exporting each weekly ranking report and doing it manually. Is there a better way that I just haven't seen? Does anyone have a better solution that I'm just too stupid to think of? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | windwardseo0 -
I need a tool/tools to extract keywords from say 50 sites in one niche and then check the rank tor those sites
This is for telemarketing of seo services I want to have some insight into an industry before I call them could this be done with the adwords keyword tool api and then exported to excel. It would also be nice to have data on backlinks say from seo moz opensite explorer.. Its just that the research you do before you even call a potential client is so time consuming and you can never really check to see how they are ranking for there main keywords manually. We are trying to automate as much of this initial research as possible... Any Idea's Thanks
Moz Pro | | duncan2740 -
About the rankings report in the Pro Dashboard, does it track the ranking of every page on a root domain, or just the home page or whichever page you set up the campaign with?
I noticed that one of the pages on my root domain has a #5 rank for a keyword, yet the ranking report says that there are no results in the top 50. So I am assuming it is only tracking the home page. That is one thing I liked about the Rank Tracker, that it would find any page that was ranking on a root domain. Thanks, Lara
Moz Pro | | larahill0