Six scary SEO scenarios (and their solutions)

Details: Thursday, 14 April 2011 19:32; Hits: 374

With Halloween just round the corner it’s time to ask what could possibly go wrong with your website and what can you do about it?

SEO as you have been told by many people so many times before is all about taking time to allow it to work, taking care to shape your keywords and allowing all its different elements to percolate so that your long-tail keywords have time to appear and start to work for you.

What about however those unexpected glitches which have the ability to throw your website off its Google perch and turn your day into a real nightmare? They happen more frequently than you think and the moment they do it’s important that you are able to understand what has happened and what you should do about it in order to help restore your website’s SEO.

1. Your main keywords have vanished from Google’s top page. Your site may have been a Google page first darling but now it appears to be nowhere at all (which means it’s fallen off the first three pages). What to do: first check to see if there is a Google update going on. Every time the Google code gets updated it takes a little time to re-index the results and it always causes a huge upset which is, however, temporary. If this happens there is nothing to do but wait. If, however, there is no Google update then it means that your site has either been blacklisted or that its competitors have seriously stepped up their efforts.
2. Your site’s pages have been mostly dropped from the Google index. Your site may have had hundreds of pages indexed by Google but now there barely seem to be a handful. This is your worst nightmare come true. Google thinks that your site is irrelevant and that much of its content is junk. What to do: change your site’s structure to a flatter one no more than three layers deep at the most. Then initiate a plan which publicises your content to search engines again through a social tagging campaign. This will get your content re-indexed and will start your site performing properly again.
3. Your PageRank (PR) has dropped. Your site used to be king of the rock when it came to PageRank and now you have dropped a point or two and feel that it’s a disaster. It is, although not as much as you may think. What to do: You need to increase the number of backlinks to your website through an aggressive link building campaign.
4. Traffic has dropped to your website. You used to have visitors coming in every moment of the day like a torrent and now the flood has dried to a few droplets. What to do: You need to implement a social network outreach marketing campaign and increase the quality content you put on your website.
5. Your bounce rate has gone up. Your site used to be stickier than flypaper but now visitors come and leave just as quickly and this is affecting your conversion ratio. What to do: You need to increase the relevancy of your content and increase your presence in the social networks.
6. Your conversion ratio has dropped. Visitors used to love your website and you had more customers than you could handle. Suddenly you are going through a dry spell where conversions have dropped off. What to do: Check your website for loading speed and double-check your navigation and site design to make sure it is still fresh and relevant. Website design changes fast on the web and unless you keep up you can get left behind.