How to avoid big Ranking Disasters with Google
The changing landscape of SEO – aka search engine optimization – keeps web designers and marketing manages on their toes. Routine updates keeps things interesting. If sites do not adapt, they can end up having big ranking disasters with Google on their hands. This is why so many engineers, web designers, product managers, marketing managers, CEOs, and more should be kept in the loop with search engine optimization trends.
As an example, there are a myriad of minor SEO mistakes that can happen – which include pages getting no-indexed, canonicals being removed, de-optimizing pages with title update or removal, navigation or critical links removed, issues with the robots.txt, and broken redirects. At times, there may be even more bizarre problems at play. For an inexperienced web designer, it may take days or even weeks to figure out the error and, at that time, it may be too late to mitigate the damage. Pay attention to the analytics. If your site’s traffic has seen a significant drop and an immediate explanation is not clear, it may be due to ranking problems with Google.
There are many components to SEO that are outside of one’s control. Firstly, we cannot control Google’s algorithm. Secondly, there is no control over what competitors are doing and the success or failure of their online marketing strategies. Thirdly, there is no control over what your superior tells you to do, meaning that sometimes a CEO may pursue a wrong strategy.
Thus, the only way to control what can be controlled and to remain as adaptable as possible is to practice safe, intuitive search engine optimization. Even to most experienced marketers, critical traffic disrupters is not always clear. Be very attentive. Inevitably issues will occur. The faster that they can be caught, the better. That way, changes can be implemented before Google has the opportunity to rank it. If you already work with a high quality SEO and online marketing company, they may be interested in conducting routine audits to catch any issues that may be present. When it comes to production updates and migrations, this is very common.
How to avoid big ranking disasters with Google involves addressing the critical and less critical items. The most common areas where a web designer or SEO marketing expert will find errors includes robots.txt changes; changes in redirect status; canonicals changes; pagination; hreflang, amp, and alt-media links; changes in titles, H1, H2, and meta tags; removing keywords from titles, H1, and H2 tags; navigation, footer, and cross-link removal; and general page changes.
This is all not to discourage a designer or marketer from making changes to a site. Changes are not inherently a bad thing on established pages. In fact, they can act as a means of keeping Google bots interested in scanning and re-scanning. And, there are many changes that will not significantly affect a site’s Google rankings. That said, it is necessary to be attentive to analytics in the aftermath of any changes just as a means of making sure that there no ranking issues or that traction is not being lost on the keywords you are targeting.
Traffic drops associated with ranking disasters on Google can always be fixed, especially if caught in the early stages. Through an experienced and high quality SEO marketing company, they can likely assist in correctly determining what the cause of the traffic drop is. After that is done, it is easy to make the necessary changes. Though it can take weeks and sometimes months to catch up to where things once were, hiring an experienced professional online marketing company is key to this journey.
