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
-
Google Rank 0 - Best way?
We are trying to create tables or bullet points on each of our pages summarising the content of the page and get it to rank on position 0 on Google. This technique worked for some searches but not all so we were wondering: Is it beneficial to add links or not ? Is there a keyword limit? We are on Magento 2 if that helps. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesDavison0 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Video SEO for Google
I was wondering what the prime factors were to make something rank for a video on Google. Does anyone have any suggestions? I think that length may be important, but I don't know what the ideal run time is. Hypothetically for local SEO, would I be better off doing a tag like "Mercedes Buffalo NY" or do individual tags of "Mercedes" and "Buffalo" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Does having all client websites on same server/same Google Analytics red flag Google?
If you have several clients, and they are all on the same server, and also under ONE Google Analytics account, will that negatively impact with Google? They all have different content and addresses, some have the same template, but with different images.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck1 -
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 -
Good Google SERPS but poor bing and yahoo rankings.
My site has some good google SERPS but yahoo and bing don't rank it well at all. I know of course they have different algorithms to google but I would expect there to be some correlation. Why does google appear to consider my site valuable and return it for search queries and yahoo/bing don't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
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