Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why

[CSawatzky]

Hi Mozzers,

I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all.

Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week.

Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected.

Suggestions? Advice? Answers?

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Hi Pedram,

Has it dropped out of it's position recently? I have seen occasional volatility like this. If you know your page is solid and your content is solid, the best thing you can do is be patient and wait. Many times I have seen a well ranked term plummet down and disappear for a few days or weeks and then pop right back up to where it was before. The other thing to evaluate is how many conversions and how much revenue was being generated by that keyword. The only reason I suggest this is because I am constantly getting emails from one stakeholder asking "why aren't we ranking for keyword x?" When, in fact, "keyword x" is not really a valuable term for us, but is more of a vanity term. If that's the case, you'll need solid data and your "educational hat" to go to your stakeholders and explain to them why they shouldn't get fixated on certain terms.

How are your rankings doing when viewed as a whole, across the board? If you haven't already, I would highly recommend building a ranking index. AJ Kohn wrote a great blog post that will walk you through how to do it. Since I built these about 6 months ago, I haven't had to respond to very many "Why aren't we ranking for Keyword X" emails. Hope this helps!

Dana

[CSawatzky]

Dana,

Thanks so much for your reply.

Yes, it did drop out of place recently. Just this week I believe it dropped. Also, it hit page one just 2-3 weeks ago, then boom gone.

Across the board, our rankings for other relevant keywords are pretty solid (I say relevant because management does want to monitor our rankings for super broad keywords that have low chance of ranking). I haven't seen any major drops in traffic or ranking as I've been monitoring. Over the past few months, in fact, I've seen natural search traffic increase as the ranking for the term I'm asking about actually went up in ranks

In regards to the conversion question - that's a great way to look at it. In fact I did that and noticed that conversion using that keyword actually increased 4 fold this past month. We went from conversions beginning with that keyword in January from about 1-2% of total non-branded conversions (that we can track i.e. no "not provided" conversions), to about 9% of total non-branded conversions in the month of May. So clearly it holds some weight

That article does provide some useful insight. Upon brief scan, it's certainly useful. I'm bookmarking and reading in detail later! Thanks

Anyone else have any input/suggestions? Dana if you have anything else to add, please do!