3 Crucial Steps To SEO Recovery
Last Friday when I got into the office, Vandi one of our account managers first comment to me before she said good morning was, “They’ve dropped”. We had a scheduled meeting later that morning with an important client whose organic traffic we had increased by over 100% in just a few months. The timing could not have been worse. Everyday in our office at least four people check every client’s rankings. Me (sadly I know) before I get out of bed on the iPad, Our Head of Development, the assigned SEO developer and the Account Manager. I’d missed the drop that particular morning because it was Valentines Day 🙂 I was going to check rankings once I’d got to the office.
SEO First Aid
The clients rankings had dropped significantly across the board. When this happens we activate our SEO First Aid Package, which is a series of methodical tasks that we perform to see if we can find a problem. I won’t reveal all our IP here but here’s what we did to find the issue with this particular client. Keep in mind, unless you know the day on which your rankings dropped it can be hard to isolate the issue.
SEO Recovery Step 1
Is the site still indexed? Using webmaster tools have a look under the Google index menu and make sure the indexed pages are stable. In this case they were. What you are looking for is some telltale sign that was not there yesterday. If you see a massive drop in the index that corresponds with ranking drop it means that Google maybe de-indexing your site.
SEO Recovery Step 2
Check for errors, these can be 404s, Server Errors or in the case of this client it was not followed errors. Here’s what we found.
You will see from the video today that there a lot of other errors but I was not worried about them as they had been around a while. Unless Google had suddenly made an update that punished other errors it was unlikely the cause. The spike in the not followed errors directly coincided with the ranking drop so that was the most likely culprit. Basically the errors would have sent the bot into an endless loop had it followed them. That would not be a site Google would want to send it users to. I’m not saying the site incurred some sort of penalty because of this but if Google was my search engine I’d certainly want to quarantine a site that looked like it would send users into an endless loop.
SEO Recovery Step 3
Fix it. In the above case the problem was fixed and the rankings came back the following day. Not to the giddy heights they were at but it’s a big site and Google has a lot of recrawling to do. My expectation is that over the next few days they will come back providing no other issue develops.
If you are not monitoring your rankings it makes your job a lot harder. The smallest hiccup in your digital marketing can lead to disaster. Unlike offline marketing though, you can fix it immediately.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
