Keeping pace with Google’s algorithm updates and avoiding a ranking drop

Google is constantly improving its search engine algorithm and delivers several major updates every year. These are rarely announced, but can be disastrous to the unprepared site owner.

If your website experiences a significant drop in search engine visibility, this is likely to have a serious detrimental impact on traffic and therefore commercial sales or leads.

“The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we’re a long, long ways from that…”

Larry Page, Founder, Google

Of course, nobody outside of Google really knows what they are planning in terms of the algorithm evolution. However, ideally you will have a plan in place that enables you to stay aware of Google’s strategic direction and therefore be one step ahead by ensuring you are always working within a best practise framework to keep your content and technical health in tip top condition.

This will minimise the likelihood of an overnight drop in traffic cause by a re-evaluation of your sites quality. However, if the worst should happen and your site does experience a dramatic drop in traffic, then it’s important that you and your colleagues understand the need for immediate action.

Top 10 areas to focus on:

• Commission an expert SEO diagnosis

• Implement trust signals to boost Expertise, Authority & Trust (EAT)

• Audit content accuracy and relevance

• Review higher ranking competitor activity

• Resolve technical issues

• Test and improve page load speed

• Remove low relevancy or duplicate content

• Review your bank link quality and disavow spam links

• Analyse and update your meta data

• Ensure all pages are being indexed

In many medium to large businesses, the people you need to execute change are from disparate areas, so it will probably be necessary to form a cross functional team to work collaboratively with the necessary specialists across your business. First thing to do when you have identified them is to commission an in depth report to identify the necessary remedial action and organise the resulting tasks into a project plan of action.

As this plan will require significant resource to bring it to fruition, you will not only have to re-organise your own team’s priorities, but also use your stakeholder relationships to get various other teams on board.

The plan will require some innovative new thinking, for example, on the content descriptions of products focused specifically to help improve search engine rankings. The advantages of doing so can be explained to potentially reluctant stakeholders by using revenue calculations of what the results of the plan would be able to deliver.

Key to the success of any such project will be maintaining momentum and progress and eventually you should be rewarded with a re-evaluation and recovery of your website by search engines which will lead to a ranking improvement and a significant increase in sales performance through organic acquisition.

If your site has experienced a rapid drop in rankings or traffic or you would like to ensure that your follow best practice, then get in touch to find out more about our SEO services.