Higher rank created a quick boost but it didn't last..
-
I made a few changes to my website which bumped it up to 3rd place for the main keyword and brought it up to the first page for some of the other keywords. I saw a spike in traffic and conversions for 2 days, but now it went down significantly again. How can I research the cause of this?
-
Great question....
SEOs must become comfortable with "dealing with uncertainty".
Search engines don't reveal how they rank websites so the best thing that you can do is to study what they do reveal, study the opinions of trusted SEOs (such as the guides and articles on SEOmoz), and ask questions in a forum like this one.
Most important, you must study continuously to stay up-to-date.
Keep in mind that much of the advice that you will receive will be wrong and don't trust advice that is very old.
Most of the decisions that I make on running my site are made with a level of uncertainty. However, before I make major moves I communicate with a few people that I trust to hear their opinions.
Remember, it is not how many people agree it is who you are listening to - and even they are wrong some of the time.
-
Take stats, dont panic and move too fast, let your results steady before you move again.
-
How do I know if what I'm doing is right or wrong then?
-
SEO work takes variable amounts of time to produce results.
PR7 links are followed daily... PR1 links are followed infrequently. Your site might not be crawled often.
So, SEO work could produce results within 48 hours or it could take a month or more.
Pay attention to your work and less to your rankings.
-
Thank you - so generally how long should I wait to see accurate results from the SEO work that I did? Also, are there test environments for keyword ranking? I'm always a little nervous making a change, fearing that its going to produce the opposite effect.
-
Sit tight.
Google has thousands of servers responding to queries and new data (rankings) can take time to propagate.
Also, Google usually has several percent of their servers returning experimental data.
By this time next week you should have a better idea of what is happening.
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
-
Too many wordpress redirects impact Rankings?
Our website cms is WordPress. We have recently changed the URL pattern of our blog pages which resulted in hundreds of crawl errors in Google search console. Even though we don't have any broken links; old pages have been reported at Google. We are trying to redirect the old URLs to new which will be handled by auto redirects or manual redirects. Will so many redirects impact on website? I don't mean about internal redirects. I mean about redirects made for the cause of reclaiming non existing pages referred from external sites
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting?
Other than having a ccTLD domain and assigning your target country in Google Webmaster Tools' "geotargeting" feature, how big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting? Is it really necessary? or it is just a small signal? Thanks in advance! 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | esiow20131 -
Algorithm update last weekend?
Hi guys, Just a simple one really. Our in house company has seen a significant improvement in rankings and traffic over the weekend period for 4-5 classified niche sites. However, so far there seems to be little out there in the blogosphere. I did find this article by Barry Schwartz, and it seems some on WMW agree: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-possible-17065.html. Has anyone else seen signs of an algorithm update around the 14th July? Cheers. (UK)
Algorithm Updates | | Sayers0 -
What is the importance of listing score at Getlisted.org regarding higher local 7 pack rankings ?
What is the importance of listing score at Getlisted.org regarding higher local 7 pack rankings ? My listing score is 60% and i am trying to improve it. I am on 2nd page on local map results. So maximum score will help to get place in 7 pack ?
Algorithm Updates | | mnkpso0 -
I used to rank 12 or 13 for a specific search term. Now I don't show up at all. What's cuasing this?
Used to rank on the second page for a specific search query, now we don't seem to show up at all for the same query. Has Google penalized us or is something else going on?
Algorithm Updates | | wlefevre0 -
Will signing up for Google Places affect my national rankings
OK, Here is a question which I can't find but think people have thought about. I would like to know others opinion. I have had a site that ranks well under generic national keyword terms. (not geographically specific) Its a small website, only 10 pages. We get 85% of our business from online applications. These applications come from all over the united states.Our SERP rankings generate 70% of all our traffic. My question is this: we operate in a state where we don't do business. We are a virtual business. Should I sign up for google places? Will It hurt my national SERP rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | FidelityOne0 -
Rankings moving in every 2 days.
Hi, I am seeing strange behavior of Google for my rankings. I have a very competitive keyword (I can't disclose because of NDA) but for example keyword like "Cameras" on google.co.uk , it stayed on #4 spot for years, we have been practising all good SEO techniques for this. From last couple of weeks, it goes to 9 then stays there for 2 days, then come back to 4 for 2 days, then go back to 9 & then after 2 days come back to 4 & it is keep moving like that... at the time of this post, this one is on 9. Our site have been on top for very competitive kws even like word "Camera" we are 2 which is stable... None of our other kws ranks are changed but only word "Cameras" is affected. I am not sure how & why this is happening, I have been following SEOMoz from long time & hope can find solution here. Note : Keywords used here are not actual, but carry equal importance Please let me know.
Algorithm Updates | | spopli0 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1