Life at the top of SEO Rankings can be akin to bliss. People look for something and they find your site listed. They click your link and then you dazzle them with your winning sales copy so that it’s totally natural for them to anxiously click the “buy now” button.
It can be a very profitable thing! But what do you do if you notice your traffic starts to drop off and then realise that you’re no longer the king (or queen) of the castle?
It’s almost inevitable that you will eventually have competition and whether you stay one step ahead of that competitor or not, there’s a very good chance that you’ll battle for the top spot continuously.
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines look at many different factors when it comes to search engine rankings and something that can change on a regular basis.
One day you could get better SEO Rankings based on your links and on another day another factor such as your number of inbound links can make an impact. You can be in the top spot one day, in the third spot, or… off the first page on another day. (Yikes!)
Tips To Regain Your SEO Rankings
• Make sure you’re not blacklisted by google. Hopefully you can find your site on the search engine pages somewhere. If you’re blacklisted, the search engines may have found some of your SEO tactics to be black hat. You may need to investigate further and send emails to search engines to ask for an appeal.
• Analyse what your competition has done that might have made them appear to be more relevant or more popular. This might be very apparent to you by looking at their site or you might decide to check with some analytics software to see if you can determine what has happened. If they have risen above your site due to grey or black hat SEO techniques, rest assured that it probably won’t be long until they get a Google slap or become blacklisted.
• Check your own reports to see if you can determine where you might be able to capture more online traffic. Are you missing out on some great keywords? Does someone have a particular part of the market cornered? Whatever is happening, you can figure out how you might be able to recapture a better spot in the search engine rankings.
• Tweak your strategy. Is there an area of SEO that you’re not currently doing? You might want to add more content, work at getting more backlinks, do some more social bookmarking.
Keeping your business profitable online will involve constantly working to increase your search engine position and will also involve working to maintain a good search engine position once you’ve reached it.
As you work to dethrone your competition, understand that the fight for top spot will probably be ongoing so it’s important to diversify your strategy so that you’re targeting more than one set of keywords and targeting more than one search engine as well.
Keeping SEO on your to-do list constantly can help you maximise your organic traffic results, so be sure to work on your SEO Rankings on a continuous basis!
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I pretty much figured that would have to be the strategy. I will need to brush up on what I need to do to rank in the other search engines rather than just relying on Google.
Hi Sean,
I think this is one of the great things about SEO. If you are not getting the results you want, it’s easy enough to make some changes that will get the traffic to start flowing again.
I guess it’s an ongoing assessment of what your competitor’s are doing and how you are placed.
I agree, it’s easy to make corrections online, much easier, faster and cheaper than changing any printed media.
But you have to constantly watch what is happening as well, as other sites will come up and try to dominate your niche.
So make sure that you are not losing your SEO ranking by keeping it the best.
Been there. Very frustrating. One page made it up to #17, just to be outside of the top 1000 one week later. I still haven’t figured out what happened and another week later it bounced back to somewhere in the 30s. Very strange indeed. But I will have a look at the blacklisting article you mentioned
Hi Sean,
What a great article. Here I am thinking that once a high ranking on search engines is achieved I could relax and take it easy…not the case.
I need to be constantly improving SEO for my website and I need to have SEO foremost on my mind so that the competition doesn’t get the upper hand.
Sean, If my rankings drop through suspected Black Hat tactics, is an appeal to the search engines via email very effective. Are the chances good or slim that they will accept an explanation that I have made a mistake that may have looked like Black Hat SEO?
I honestly doubt it would help Jill, but it’s one of the options you could try. Chances are, that if you go about your SEO with a white hat mindset, you will never have any problems
All this SEO seems very involved! What happened to my lifestyle lying on a beach in one of the outer Islands of Fiji while the money meters on my blogs just kept clocking up the thousands of dollars as they come flowing in?
At the moment all my time is taken up with learning, day and night and every weekend and I know that there is a lovely banana lounge out on a pacific Island with my name on it just waiting for me. In the meantime I need to be gaining, not losing my SEO rankings, so back to the drawing board.