We know that trying to improve your search engine results page (SERP) ranks can seem like a daunting and perplexing undertaking, so we created this simple checklist to help you identify and fix any problems with your page’s rank.
Identifying the issue is the first step in developing a solution. Preventing future declines in conversion rates requires first pinpointing exactly where and when these declines occur. If you need some guidance in getting started, here are some useful hints.
Identify the Problems
Find the source of the issue and give higher priority to fixing the pages on your site that aren’t operating as well as you’d want. A huge website needs specific attention paid to its various areas (news, products, about us, etc.). You should also analyse your search traffic over time to pinpoint when and why it began to decline. By organising your site’s URLs into sections and using subfolders, you may examine a single region and optimise it in detail.
Make Use of Diagnostic Inquiries
Get a sense of what might be wrong with your page by running some queries (s).
Check the web with your primary search terms. One of your primary goals should be to rank highly for the phrase “house cleaning services Atlanta” if you own a house cleaning service in that city. Determine where you currently stand and whether or not your position has improved over time.
Type in your company’s name and the term you want to rank for. Yoursite.com house cleaning services Atlanta is a good example of a search to try. An issue as significant as a Google penalty surrounding your website or company name may exist if you aren’t ranking for a keyword like this.
Insert a passage from one of your works here (any string of more than about ten words). To test if Google is pulling up your material, try removing the quotation marks. (And why wouldn’t it be? This is a very targeted inquiry!)
Use quotation marks around the search term. For example, if you’re performing well for the content within quotations but not without them, you may safely rule out duplicate content as the problem and instead focus on content quality or a Google penalty.
Do a search for a URL string like “site:YourSite.com/services/housecleaningservices” to see if your content has been indexed. Meta robots, robots.txt, and crawl problems could be at blame if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
With a programme like Ping dom, you can see if a site is available or not. You might have seen little traffic because your site was down and you didn’t realise it.
Use a tool like Screaming Frog for on-page and crawl monitoring to quickly identify any problems with your site.
Be cautious to double-check if searching on Bing and Yahoo is affected if you’re experiencing technical difficulties. It’s possible that an algorithm update is to blame if your issues appear to be specific to Google. For the most recent changes, check out Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines.
Google’s Fetch and Render tool can help you examine how your material appears to the search engine, so you can fix any problems you see.
Do Some Hypothesis Testing on Your Search Engine Results Page Problems
The next step is to formulate hypotheses regarding the possible causes of your issues. The first step is to assess the current circumstance. If your ranks have gone up but your traffic has gone down, or if they have gone down while their traffic has gone up, you are experiencing a decline.
It’s possible that the following factors are to blame for an increase in ranks yet a decrease in traffic:
- Decreased need to search (as seen in Google Trends)
- Modernized Search Engine Results Page Functions (such as featured snippets, could be stealing more traditional organic traffic)
- Problems with the Brand (just experience a PR Nightmare? Possible impact on traffic.
It’s time for maintenance or repair
After gathering data and developing hypotheses, it’s time to implement modifications. The following is a summary of possible solutions to the issues mentioned above.
Troubles with Coding and Content: Ask Google to do a new crawl and index. Depending on how many pages are involved, this could take a few of weeks.
Spam and broken links: They can take months to fix, therefore it’s best to avoid them from the start by using proper linking techniques. In some cases, an algorithm update may be required.
Improve a Large Number of Individual Chapter Pages: It won’t help much to update a little part of the section of your website that isn’t doing well. Changing the majority of these pages will have an effect. It may be more practical to start over with new URLs rather than attempt to repair the old ones.
Improve the Performance of Individual Pages
- You should add new content to your page and update the existing content, especially if it contains out-of-date information or has changed statuses. In a nutshell, this is the best strategy for rapidly climbing the ranking.
- Keep content interesting by republishing it. It doesn’t matter how amazing the information on your page is if it hasn’t been updated in years or if it was published in the early days of the Internet era.
- If your rankings have changed dramatically, it’s time to either start optimising for SEO or revise your target keyword and content to reflect the new situation.