If you work in marketing and have anything at all to do with managing your brand’s blog then you have at least some of the responsibility of making sure your company avoids a downward trend in network traffic.
Though SEO rankings can fluctuate for several different reasons, often preventable human error is the cause. Let’s first look at some of the things causing the loss in network traffic and SEO ranking.
You could be tracking the wrong keywords- Has the Google algorithm updated recently?
- Is your website new?
- The quality of your content could be inferior
- Your links may not be of good quality
- Is your hosting service reputable?
- Have you been penalized by Google?
- Is your competition exerting more effort?
- Has your business moved?
Looking at this list it I easy to see how SEO mistakes can happen. So, here are more suggestions to recover and improve your ranking.
Content is still king
Though there are several aspects to having a high ranking, according to Google, “low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”
When was the last time you updated the blog?
If it has been awhile you may have a competitor with a newer, more complete link that is winning the battle for ranking. If this is the case, you need to update the post with new content and links.
Have you been consistently promoting your blog via email?
If not, you need to do some promotion including the post in an email with its link prominently displayed.
Compare your post to those of your competitors
Are your graphics and visuals as good? Do they have more comprehensive content? They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so do be afraid to imitate what is causing them to achieve a higher ranking. Adapt their strategy to your post.
Now, before you panic and take unnecessarily drastic steps try some simple solutions first. Start by checking with the marketing department. A simple SEO fix may be all that is required to enhance your ranking.
Check for site crawl issues by using Google’s site crawl tools you can find here. These errors can stop your site from appearing in search engines.
Check for the possibility that a team member may have inadvertently caused and SEO problem during a site update. Look for recent updates and analyze them for this issue.
Something that happens more often than people realize is that your credit card expired and your Domain Registrar was unable to complete the charge to your card. Seems a simple thing but often overlooked.
Once you have reestablished your SEO ranking you need to monitor it frequently. Run monthly reports so you can address any issues before they become too big and hurt your business.