How Do You Diagnose Declines In Page Ranking & What Action Should You Take?
Sometimes, you may notice a discrepancy in the way your website pages perform with, for example, the home page losing ground but the internal ones doing well. If this happens, it’s important not to panic, but you do need to take time to analyse what is going on. The situation is, admittedly, not made any easier by the fact that there could be any number of reasons why certain pages are seeing declines, while others are motoring ahead.
At Front Page Advantage, we’ve seen this many times, so here are our top tips:
Keep the bigger picture in mind
As we said, take a breath, take action, but don’t panic. It’s important to look at the bigger picture. Even if some pages are declining, overall traffic and leads may still be on the rise, so there may not be a major issue at all.
Know your goals
At the same time, it’s important always to keep front of mind the objectives and goals you have for the SEO of your website and to be sure whether you are on track for achieving them. This will help ensure that you don’t try to fix things which aren’t broken, which in fact could actively damage your website in the long term.
Assess your losses
You may not be able to pinpoint the source of a ranking decline, but it’s easy enough to identify which keywords are behind the ranking declines as long as you are tracking rankings and have set access to analytics. It may also be possible to assess the type of traffic which is going down.
Equally, searcher behaviour can also have an effect. If you’re targeting keywords which are in decline generally, for example, that could be having an impact. Alternatively, technical glitches may be the reason for the decline, especially if the problem is with the mobile version of your website.
Generate interest
If your search traffic is going down, one of the best things you can do is work harder to generate greater overall interest. This isn’t necessarily done via the search engine results pages.
Check your links
For most websites, most links from most other websites are pointed to the home page. However, occasionally internal pages will generate links in greater numbers. That can cause these other pages to outrank a home page for some terms, and actually there’s nothing wrong with that. The trick is to ensure your internal pages are relevant to new visitors so that they can easily convert to become customers.
How we can help
To sum up, there are actually several reasons why an internal page may be doing better than your home one and it certainly doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Check your links, technical SEO and content. It’s also worth seeing how any close competitors are faring. Ultimately, it may well just be case of adapting your internal pages so that these are consistently relevant.
At Front Page, we’re here to talk to any client who is concerned about a page ranking that’s dropping. Ranking decline is something we have extensive experience of handling. Get in touch, whether you’re an existing or potential customer and we’ll ensure your rankings stay on track.