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
-
Best Keyword Strategy for Lower-Authority-Ranked Domain
Hi, What should a lower-authority-ranked blog (DA - 21) who is trying to increase general traffic focus on above all when selecting keywords: difficulty, monthly volume, opportunity, or priority? I know that all are important factors to consider, but I fear that without an already consistent following our new content will just get hidden behind more established domains if we select too difficult of keywords. I'd love to hear from someone who's built up a blog audience as to what strategy they used here. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ascott7770 -
Why is my page rank disapointing
Hi fairly new here, so just getting used to everything one questions please. Just ran a crawl test of the website and this page http://www.livingphilosophy.org.uk/teaching-philosophy/index.htm came back with a page authority of 1. Other pages have a rank of 18 through 26 scratched my head for a few hours and came up with no ideas. thanks andy
Moz Pro | | livingphilosophy0 -
Magento webshop ranks bad on Category pages
Hi All! Our webshop is www.hond.nl. We operate it for about a year now and it is not ranking on our most important pages. Basically we have 3 types of pages: Category pages, Product pages and 'Splash' pages. The 2nd and the 3rd rank OK. But the 1st, the category pages not at all. While the category pages have the best (hand written, unique) and the most content. For example https://www.hond.nl/hondenvoer.html is not ranking on keyword 'hondenvoer' (position 140...) We have investigated quite thoroughly and did most common (moz) tests and can't find a reason why the category pages don't rank. (could it have something to do with the filters...?) If anybody can shed some light on it, we would be much obliged! Thanks, Sander
Moz Pro | | Canome790 -
SEO and page redirects from a high ranking site quandary
We are launching a site on a new domain that is taking the place of a group (subset) of pages in an existing domain. BUT The pages on the existing domain have really good SEO rankings in a very competitive category and we want to leverage the traffic it gets today in the best way, so.... Which of the following would be the best practice in this case (in regards to SEO)? Modify the existing pages' content so that there are prominent calls to action that lead the users to the new domain. Create permanent redirects for the existing pages for their counterparts on the new domain. This is more direct for the user but we don't know how it will affect the current ranking. Something other than the above. Many thanks for you help Gary
Moz Pro | | gazza10 -
Rank tracker
Which paid rank tracker is best? Free rank tracker best? --How many keywords we can check per profile from free tool? --How many profiles we can manage from it? Is their any way we can upload bulk keywords in Moz Rank tracker?
Moz Pro | | csfarnsworth0 -
Why is the weekly rankings report often inaccurate?
Does anybody else notice that the Moz weekly rankings report are often inaccurate? Many times it says a keyword (or many keywords) fell out of the top 50, although when I manually check the keyword in a Google search, it still shows that those keywords are ranking in the top 10. I've done these manual searches with personalized search settings turned off, as well as from a completely unbiased computer. Why is this happening? Does anybody have any suggestions? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | jampaper0 -
Tracking keyword rankings on sub pages
Hello, What is the best way to track keywords on sub pages of a website through seomoz? Do we need to create a separate campaign for each sub page? Thanks for all the help!
Moz Pro | | DerekDenholm0 -
Can you export a keyword rankings report with the keywords listed in order of ranking ?
My keyword ranking report shows the results all jumbled. I can put them in order when viewing the report online, but when I export it , the results go back to all jumbled rankings.
Moz Pro | | jlane90