Increasing Search Queries

[raph3988]

Recently I had a drop in the over all number of search queries my website was ranking for (about 50%) on October 5th. I did not lose rankings for my target keywords. How can I regain these lost opportunities?

[smokin_ace]

Hi Raphael,

If you have lost some rankings on some of your keywords then most probably your SEO strategy is not the right one.

First of all I will suggest you to start from on-page optimisation for those keywords, where you've lost your rankings. Just make sure that all your title tags, H1 tags, Alt tages are written properly. Then check if you have sufficient number of targeted keywords in your content and make sure if content is not duplicated.

Then you can review your linkbuilding strategy and try to get some relevant (by website theme) links from good quality websites. Also you can use new Google tool to disable bad quality links.

And I am sure your rankings will recover.

Cheers,

Russel

[IainReloadMedia]

Hi Raphael,

These are the steps you need to go through to first identify the issue, then solve it.

1. Identify if there is any seasonal variation in your target keywords - Google keyword tool will help with this.
2. Identify if there is a drop for keywords you're not racking. You maybe tracking 100 keywords, but it's a safe bet to say you're getting found for many more than you're tracking. Have the traffic to these dropped?
3. Has your (not provided) keyword traffic increased? Check in Google analytics

Once you understand where the drop has come from, you can then start to work out the problem.

1. If it's seasonal, were the search terms for Halloween? Not much you do.
2. If it's non rank tracked keywords, start making useful content that is about your long tail keywords and build some related links
3. If it's not provided, then your overall traffic probably hasn't gone down.

Following these steps will put you on the right track.

Thanks

Iain - Reload Media

[ElevateMP]

Before you can even starting thinking of regaining the lost opportunities, you need to identify the source of the problem. How can you solve the problem without identifying it first? Since you didn't lose any rankings for your targeted keywords, it sounds like the strategy you have in place for your targeted keywords is fine and the lost opportunities are stemming from your non-targeted keywords. Find out what keywords have taken the biggest hit, locate the associations of these non-targeted keywords to your site and identify what about your site was causing it to hit on these particular keywords. Only when you answer these questions can you begin to strategize how to regain your lost opportunities.

[raph3988]

Nice strategy. I'll look into it.

[MoosaHemani]

Nov 5^th 2012 is the exact data of the 21^st Google Panda rollout!

Are you a victim of it? May be, because the date is exactly the same data when Google rolled out hte update on Panda. Here is the like to it! http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-21-15918.html

I guess when you need to do is to figure out what quires are lost and what pages were ranking against it.. once done, start fixing the pages in terms of on-page and content and get more natural links to it and most probably things will go good with you again!