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
-
Unsolved Getting keywords to rank on new landing pages
I've built new landing pages for a website, and have loaded them with researched keywords in the content, alt image attributes and metas etc - but, after a number of crawls, the keywords are currently being matched to other existing web pages on the website. Does anyone have any advice on 'unlatching' these keywords from these pages, and instead getting them to match with pages that have been optimised for them? Many thanks!
Moz Pro | | Darkstarr6660 -
Is There a Tool to Link Moz Keyword Rankings With Google Adwords Campaigns?
I wanted to know if there is a tool or other way to automatically link my Moz keyword rankings with my Google Adwords account for the purpose of allowing me to "pause" Adwords campaigns for keywords for which I rank well in the SERP's and to "activate" Adwords for keywords for which I do not rank well. Since these rankings can change from week to week, it would be great to be able to turn on and off Adwords for specific keywords depending upon my rankings that week.
Moz Pro | | hildebrandlaw0 -
Rank tracker free one and paid one
Very easy question for most of the fellow.I have one site and I want to track more than 30 keywords for this big site. Which Free Rank Tracker do you suggest me? If I want to purchase it to create Multiple profile or track multiple sites which one is best and cheapest. SEOMOZ rank tracker is very slow for results.
Moz Pro | | csfarnsworth0 -
Keyword rankings tool is not working properly
My website http://www.logobite.com/ is in 29th position for the keyword "logo inspiration" but your keyword rankings tool is not showing up 😞 why?
Moz Pro | | logobite0 -
Rankings w/ Geographic Bias
I'm looking for a way to see the right rankings with geographic bias in mind. As an example, is there a way to indicate to SEOMoz to pull Google Rankings for San Francisco. The most narrow I can get is by country which won't work for several clients. I know Linkdex does this but would love to know if SEOMoz has a similar capability? If not, does anyone know of another company besides Linkdex?
Moz Pro | | aevans720 -
Strange nothing site ranking
Hi There. If you check who ranks for "credit cards" there is a website https://www.woolworthsmoney.com.au/ that is in position #5 This is a highly competitive keyword, but OpenSiteExporer.org cannot give me any backlinks for it. it says "No Data Available for this URL" The same thing happens in Market Samurai - no data 1. What are these guys doing that the others are not? 2. How come OSE can't pull any data for it?
Moz Pro | | SearchProduct0 -
Rank tracker based on personalization or not?
I have been using the rank tracker to update clients on their current positions/improvements etc. but have been told a number of times now that the results they were seeing were not the same. Does the rank tracker work by giving results based off my location or from somewhere else or what? I should mention that I am based in Malta and my clients are based in the UK and Italy (with their sites being optimized for local keywords) I also ask them to clear their browsing history and to restart their browser before they check.
Moz Pro | | MassivePrime0 -
When will Rank Tracker be mended
I have been waiting for many days now to use rank tracker but it is still broke. when i put the keyword into rank tracker the wheel just goes around and around and brings no results. Can anyone from the semoz team let me know when it will be mended
Moz Pro | | ClaireH-1848860