Dealing With Varying Rankings

In our recent post about rankings disappearing, we listed several reasons your rankings may vary substantially between checks. One factor was that searches by different people may show different results, and searches from different locations may do the same. The keyword ranking reporting Rank Magic does for our clients is done consistently so that trend comparisons should be pretty accurate even though the rankings we find may differ slightly from what you may find doing your own search.

A better measure may be the traffic on your site.

If a keyword phrase disappears from the rankings one month but your traffic remains steady for it, you can discount the ranking report as an aberration.

Another reason traffic reporting is helpful has to do with keyword selection. Some SEOs have been known to optimize and track rankings for keywords that are easy to rank highly for because no one searches for them. They may report great rankings that bear no relationship to whether your website is actually getting visitors as a result.

For that reason, we’re adding something new to our SEO Monitoring services. If you have Google Analytics on your website, we’ll report to you on that monthkly along with our ranking reports.

Ask us about adding this to your SEO Monitoring services.

Not monitoring your site’s performance? You really should — either manually yourself or with help from a professional Here’s what we include in our services:

• Monthly Broken Link Report so you’ll know if you’ve got dead links on your site that you need to clean up.
• Monthly Link Popularity Report showing how many inbound links are reported for you by Google, Yahoo and Bing. This also shows how many links are reported for about a half dozen of your most important competitors.
• Comprehensive online Keyword Status Reports updated for you monthly. If you’ve been a client of ours recently, you’ve probably seen them and know how thorough and how valuable they are. We typically run the first one for you as soon as you identify your keywords (as a baseline report) and then monthly thereafter.
• Review of your Traffic Reports monthly if you have Google Analytics installed on your website and give us access to review it.

If Rank Magic isn’t helping you monitor your search engine health, ask us how easy and inexpensive it is.

Some Keyword Rankings Gone?

Every once in awhile you may notice that some keywords suddenly seem to drop out of rankings and then pop right back a month later. We see that on occasion. What’s that all about?

Well, perhaps we  should explain a bit about ranking reporting.

1. If you check a keyword’s ranking from computers at two different physical locations, you’re likely to get slightly different results due to your results coming from different data centers. Google has dozens of data centers around the country, and they’re not all precisely synchronized. So this is one reason you might get different rankings.
2. Search engine tweak their ranking algorithms frequently. They often try a change, evaluate it for a few days, and then undo it if it didn’t work as hoped. This is a common cause of rankings that seem to disappear and then reappear.
3. Search engines are beginning to personalize results. If Google figures out that you’re a wine connoisseur or you own a restaurant, when you search for glasses they may send you more results about glassware than about eyeglasses.

All of these create variable results that are not always replicable from one query to the next, or even from one browser to the next.

Rankings that disappear are no cause for panic unless they’re still missing for two-three months. If that happens, ask us to investigate the problem for you.

The last time we wrote about SEO Monitoring, we were sending out detailed monthly reports on CD four times a year. That’s been much improved, and it’s time for us to tell you about it.

We now have even more comprehensive reporting about where you rank in Google, Yahoo & Bing for all of your keyword phrases, with details about trends, which web pages are coming up for your keywords, and even competitor comparisons. At the right is an example of just one overview graph from our reports. This one shows the overall rankings trend for a client over the course of their first year with us.

If you’re not effectively tracking your rankings, let us refer you to a cautionary tale of what happened to one former client. Contact us to discuss setting up effective monitoring of your keyword rankings.

A Cautionary Tale

We often explain to our clients why SEO done properly results in rankings that remain relatively persistent for months and years with no need to re-tweak your web site of change on-page optimization techniques. While that’s true, rankings do fluctuate, and there are circumstances where your rankings may drop rather permanently.

A client of ours had terrific visibility when we optimized him five or six years ago, and he may have taken us a little too literally about his rankings being persistent. For the past five years, he hasn’t checked his visibility in the search engines at all. And for awhile I guess that was alright.

When we spoke a few months ago, though, he told me business was quite slow, and he blamed it on the economy. I ran one of our Keyword Status Reports to take a look, and his visibility had plummeted to only one tenth what it used to be. Now he’s not so sure if business is slow because of the economy or because customers can’t find him when they’re searching for his services. What happened?

His business flourished so much after he was optimized that he decided to give his website a facelift. His web designer had moved to the west coast so he found another local web designer to redesign his site. Now I’ve said in this blog in the past that most web designers are clueless about SEO and explained why that is. This was a classic case in point. His new web designer had undone all of the optimization on his web site. The only way anyone could find him on the web was if they already knew his company name!

His web site had been like that for years, and he’d been getting referral business from previous customers. But that slows down over time and the customer base needs to be refreshed by new customers coming from the web. That just wasn’t happening.

If we had fixed the problem shortly after his site was redesigned, his rankings may not have dipped perceptably. But after three or four years we have a lot of time to make up.  That’s why I always encourage our clients to watch the rankings for all of their important keywords on a regular basis.

Our SEO Monitoring service does that, with online rankings reports that show keyword rankings, ranking trends over time, comparison to competitors and more – all updated monthly. Graphs make it easy to see at a glance if keywords are holding steady, improving, or declining. And we send an email letting our clients know each time an updated report is ready.

While our service is inexpensive, you can monitor your rankings manually for free, given the time and discipline. Discipline is usually the operative concern. Just like backing up your computer, you need to have it on an automated schedule so that over time it doesn’t get neglected like our poor client who lost all his visibility by neglecting the health of his rankings..

We’re offering two new programs to our clients that I’d like to share with you.  These are most appropriate after your main SEO campaign has concluded.

SEO Monitoring

Search engine rankings, when achieved properly, tend to be relatively stable over time without the need formajor revisions to your optimization. Nevertheless, nothing stays the same forever. Your rankings may fluctuate up and down, or they may even begin a steady decline, depending on a number of factors.

Search engines are always adjusting their ranking algorithms, giving more weight to certain things and less weight to others. Lately, we’re seeing more weight being given to incoming links and the clickable text of those links. Your competitors may be adding links and starting to beat you out in the results. Links on your site may go bad, reducing your TrustRank and negatively affecting your rankings. (I have an article on that subject under consideration at Entrepreneur Magazine’s web site. I’ll report here if and when it’s published.)

You can’t react to changes in your rankings if you’re not aware of  them. And you don’t want to wait until they reveal themselves through fewer clients or customers. That’s why we’re offering an SEO Monitoring package so you’ll always know if anything needs attention. Here’s what’s included:

SEO Maintenance

If it looks like you’re in a competitive enough environment that you need additional link popularity and a higher PageRank in order to maintain or advance your rankings, our SEO Maintenance program takes the SEO Monitoring program one step further by including link building at the rate of an hour a month.

If you’re wondering whether one of these programs is appropriate for you, please give us a call.