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 History
I realize you can click on a specific keyword and view Ranking History for approximately the most recent 12 weeks. I am wondering if you plan on offering additional options (e.g. 6 mo or 1 yr)? It would be great to show clients progress over a greater time span. I am aware of the csv download, but my clients are not interested in looking at or comprehending raw csv data. Can anyone suggest a good tutorial for transforming csv into a decent looking graph? Or, perhaps a software that is capable of doing the same - for those of us that quite simply don't have the time to crash into yet another learning curve 😉 Thanks!
Moz Pro | | SCW0 -
Why Rank Tracker don't work for 2 days?
It dosen't work just keep reloading and i get error "unable to retreave your ranking" or something like that. Anyone have some answear?
Moz Pro | | sasa0370 -
Test page ranking in search engine
Is there a tool on SEOMOZ that allows me to get search engine ranking(s) for a specific page with a specific set of keywords?
Moz Pro | | Webxtrakt0 -
Article Directory Page Rank 7
Hi Guys, Would I be correct in my assumption that if I submitted articles to this directory: www . thefreelibrary.com I would recieve a link back to my site of PR7. Could this be correct? Any help with this and any information on Article Directories worth submitting in would be great. Thank for looking, Craig
Moz Pro | | fenwaymedia1 -
SEOmoz campaign - keyword rankings...
Hi there, I have a quick question: Does it make a difference if I add keywords to a campaign with the '[' and ']' brackets included? I just realized that I had copy/pasted many of my keywords from the exported CSV from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and I fear that the keyword rankings on SEOmoz might factor the brackets as part of the keywords themselves. Thanks in advance! Ben
Moz Pro | | BenHammer0 -
Rank Tracker violate Google Guidelines?
I would like to find out whether the use of SEOMOZ rank tracker violate Google's guidelines. "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
Moz Pro | | PGRob0 -
Rank Tracker via API
Hello SEOMoz, The functionality of the Rank Tracker Tool is excellent - I was wondering if it might be coming to the API so we can do some deeper analysis? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | igzebedze0 -
Exporting ranking stats; errors
previously, when I went to export the weekly rank stats, the csv opened into excel and everything was fine. This week, one campaign data will not export other than purely in comma deliniated and will not translate to colums in ecel. A second campaign does export directly to excel but the data showing (on 27th June) is for the 22 february (report created march 1). so all my spread sheets for position analysis are up the creek and I cant even get last weeks positional report on my key domain. any thoughts??
Moz Pro | | Citybase0