How to reverse declining Google rankings?
-
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back.
We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to:
-
perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software
-
put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry
-
provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community
-
undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers
Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
-
-
I have a few thoughts.
The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on:
https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
"put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry"
Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry."
If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis.
The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other.
Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"
-
I would say there isn't a hard and fast rule. However, having a content audit is of utmost importance. It's easier to automate if you are running an e-commerce site whereby product names can combine with certain key phrases.
I would support having a content strategy team to fix up the title elements and duplication issues (this could be your tagging/categorisation/internal linking issues)
-
What tools are at your disposal depends strongly on how your site was built and what you and your team have access to. I've not used any tools that automate titles, so I wouldn't want to recommend anything in particular, but searching such a topic in the Moz forums would likely lead you in a good direction.
-
Thanks - is there any guidance available anywhere on how to semi automate that process?
-
Pretty big. Duplicate content is a no-no and certainly has a sizable impact on your rankings. Title elements aren't necessarily as big a deal - however, usually, longer titles means they were never keyword-optimized to begin with. You can semi-automate that process, but no matter what you do, make sure you don't have duplicate titles.
-
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for your email, it is very much appreciated. We definitely have issues and we will look to address these. Specifically, Moz Pro is reporting:
6344 Duplicate Page Content Issues and 13109 Title Element is too longHow big an impact do these type of things generally have?Thanks
-
All of that sounds very good and ambitious! While you cover a lot of bases, I think putting a lot of your energy into your audit will prove to be worthwhile. Making sure your site is mobile-optimized, your content isn't lacking or overstuffed with keywords, no duplicate entries, nor errors, light code, etc. There are always small improvements that can be made, and while they may not do much on their own, collectively it can mean a lot. Blogging and social are always a great asset, but care starts at home, so to speak.
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
-
Ecommerce Google Bias?
Does Google bias the type of content which ranks? HI Guys, If i wanted to create a nice blog post around a topic like: black dresses or yoga pants. If you view google.com or google.com.au results all the top ranking URLs are e-commerce pages which list the products. There is very rarely - blog content e.g. top black dresses to wear... or 7 of the hottest yoga pants on the market. The search intent is about the same i.e. someone looking for black dresses would be interested in that blog post. So in my conclusion Google has some form of bias in delivering ecommerce sites above blog/skyscrapper form of content. Thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Duplicating relevant category content in subcategories. Good or bad for google ranking?
In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages. For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.0 -
HUGELY different ranking for a keyword between Bing and Google. Looking for ideas.
We rank really well for a brand in Bing (#2 behind manufacturer, and it's a competitive name) but are in about 15th place in Google. Any suggestions on what could be hurting us in Google are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absoauto1 -
What is Google supposed to return when you submit an image URL into Fetch as Google? Is a few lines of readable text followed by lots of unreadable text normal?
I am seeing something like this (Is this normal?): HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Autoboof
Server: nginx
Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Last-Modified: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:23:04 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1209600
Expires: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:23:55 GMT
X-Request-ID: v-8dd8519e-8a1a-11e5-a595-12313d18b975
X-AH-Environment: prod
Content-Length: 25505
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:24:11 GMT
X-Varnish: 863978362 863966195
Age: 16
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1 ����•JFIF••••��;CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v80), quality = 75
��C•••••••••• •
••
••••••••• $.' ",#(7),01444'9=82<.342��C• ••••
•2!!22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222��•••••v••"••••••��••••••••••••••••
•���•••••••••••••}•••••••!1A••Qa•"q•2���•#B��•R��$3br�
••••%&'()*456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz���������������������������������������������������������������������������•••••••••••••••••••
•���••••••••••••••w••••••!1••AQ•aq•"2�••B���� #3R�•br�0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings
I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage. We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links. This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared. Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile. This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it. An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor? So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Is there something wrong with my rank?
So I have blog with 5 posts. I don't know why but 1 of my posts rank higher than my main page...and it's not even trying to rank for the keyword. I'm not saying it's a bad thing because the post has some amazon on it but my main site is supposed to rank higher. Something wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6786486312640 -
Google Page Rank Dead?
Does PR still work? I have sites that have PR3 and get almost no traffic and sites that are PR1 and get thousands of uniques per month. My PR on my main sites haven't moved for about 7 years, even though we've grown significantly. I know lots of you are going to jump in with get the MOZ toolbar, which I already have done, and I agree, it's great ... But can anyone tell me about what's going on with Google PR? Is it still active? Or has Google abandoned? I noticed that the Google toolbar is not even available for Google Chrome. That should say something ... If you like this question, do me a favor, and give me a THUMBS UP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold2 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0