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
-
My home page has an "A" rank in Moz and not ranking in Google.
My home page recently dropped from page one in Google to not being ranked for my top keyword. The page has an "A" ranking in MOZ for the keyword. Is there a way to find out the cause. I did have what looked like a duplicate page for a while 3 months ago when a domain was forwarding to my home page incorrectly. Appeared with second domain name instead of primary. Our business has been 95% through internet leads so quite an issue. Is there anyway to find out what is going on.
Moz Pro | | FredRoven0 -
Page Rank vs Page and Domain Authority - who wins?
A client has found another SEO agency promising various things to do with link building. Most of these promises are based upon links from sites with allegedly high page ranks. So my questions: Page rank seems to be fading out am I safe to stay with PA and DA metrics instead? I don't agree with link building tactics and feel that it should more a networking activity to provide USEFUL links to users... am I being too white hat and missing opporunities? The other company have promised long list of links including 100 SEO friendly web directory listings, 200 PR 8 back links from Pinterest (which i thought was no follow) & 10 long lasting and high quality mini web sites (with three pages/posts, video and pictures). Am I right that this all sounds a little spammy or is this really what I should be doing for me clients?
Moz Pro | | SoundinTheory0 -
Keyword Rankings Compare to X not working
Anyone else having trouble with the compare your keyword positions with competitors section of the analytics? The rankings for my site(s) are fine but whichever competitor I click on to compare rankings to just returns 'Not in Top 50' the competitor is ranking. I have just manually checked and they are very much listed in the engine. Is this tool broken?
Moz Pro | | GrumpyCarl0 -
How can i export a historical ranking report which contains keywords with special characters.
How can i export a historical ranking report which contains keywords with special characters? Previously it only turned the keywords into jumbled format (forgot the tech term) in excel i.e. онлайн чат which are in this case russian characters. The way i got around this was to import it into google docs but that also is now converting it into this format. Due to this i 1 do not know what the keywords are and 2 all my formulas do not work.
Moz Pro | | ColumK0 -
Ranking Differs between SEOmoz and Google Webmaster?
My Google webmaster ranking for keywords differs significantly from SEOmoz. For example, Webmaster say 8 and SEOmoz says 1...thoughts?
Moz Pro | | mjcarrjr0 -
Why isn't Ranking Updated?
I see that my rankings are not updated. Why is that so? Do we have to do something else for ranking to update or is it automatic? It's said that ranking updates every tuesday. Also when does the next Linkscape update take place? JGHjA.png
Moz Pro | | ConversionChamp0 -
Is it possible to see rankings on a graph?
Would it be possible to display Ranking data on a graph to show progress over a period of time? It would be great to be able to show a client how a certain keyword has improved over a time period.
Moz Pro | | barnst0 -
SEO pro tool ranking section
Hi, I look this morning on the rank checker for my site and it said 127 KW's had improved with 11 Declining. Just refreshed it..... 105 improved with 60 declining???? Why is this - i havent changed anything with the past wk!!!! thanks
Moz Pro | | wazza19850