Ranking fluctuations from week to week

[EricaMcGillivray]

It would be great if you could leave your site URL and some examples of what you're looking to rank for so we could dig in.

Did you do any recent changes to your site that may account for ranking changes?

[chill986]

The website is oztruckingandrigging.com.  I've attached a link to the keyphrases that show a big drop - but I have just as many that went up by a significant amount.  And it seems to be a weekly thing now.  Very weird.

Z2kxLv9.png

[EricaMcGillivray]

Looking at your site, I noticed a couple things:

Your site speed is pretty slow. You can use pingdom.com to check your site speed. This is a great study by Jon Colman about site speed and how much it actually affects your site. I noticed that you're running WordPress, and here's some tips on how to speed up your WP site. Google definitely factors in speed, and this could be affecting how the bots reach your site (or don't reach it) and account for the flux week-to-week. You are correct in that it shouldn't be that dramatic of a change week-to-week.

I also noticed that your homepage was a little overly optimized for keywords. As search engines start getting more semantic, you want to optimize more for the user. Definitely don't kill all the keywords, but balance is the key. Read through the copy as a visitor, not just the SEO and industry expert.

[chill986]

Thanks - I have been working to configure W3TC to improve page speed - only recently started working on it.  And yeah - I overoptimized in the beginning and have started rethinking the content based upon what I've been reading lately.  Will do - you think that page speed might be part of the problem?  W3TC is one of the most highly recommended performance plugins, but I don't think it is as good as some of the new plugins recently released.  Will search for a different one.

I appreciate the feedback - I'll see how things go next week.

[EricaMcGillivray]

I do think it's worth exploring other plug-ins and working in the nuts-and-bolts of site speed. Even though WP plug-ins are very helpful, it's always good to know the details of what's happening as much as possible. I'm not exactly sure how W3TC works -- I've never used it or any other site speed plug-ins personally for WP -- but it's possible it can't optimize everything or that it's working the best it or any plug-in can.

[chill986]

I have a client that has been trying a different plugin with huge success - compared directly to W3TC.  I just haven't been convinced yet will try it and see.

[Ray-pp]

you may want to try out www.Cloudflare.com - They provide a free CDN which may give you a big boost in page speed with very little effort and it's free.

[chill986]

I can do that with my clients that are on shared service accounts for free, but not for my VPS clients - this one is shared, so good idea.  I think I probably have some images that can be resized as well.  I have the load speed on the home page down to 3 seconds, so getting there.

[chill986]

I went to a meetup last night that specifically talked about SEO, and although I wasn't given a good answer to this problem - and yes it continues - last week I had 30+ keywords improve by 48+ positions to #1 and this week I had 10+ drop to higher than 51,  I'm told that this is not unusual (not convinced of that either) especially with the new "localized" feature of Moz.com, and that ranking scans might be run from anywhere in the country causing the fluctuations.  This is the only site I'm seeing such dramatic swings so I'm sceptical.  I just discovered that I still have a .png as my header image (discovered last night, and have been working to improve server response speed.

I'm hoping that I can get a good streamlined configuration for a caching plugin that will work "generally" for all my sites.  I'm still open to suggestions and thanks for this one.

[EricaMcGillivray]

So I want to suggest checking out the webinar we had yesterday on speeding up your website.

I also wanted to address your comment about your crawlers and localized rankings possibly messing up your rankings. This is not the case. The crawler that looks at your site in Moz Analytics is different from our rankings crawlers. They do not connect. They do not influence rankings as the bots only record the information in the SERPs based on your keywords; they don't click into your site. Does that make sense?

[chill986]

It does.  I was sceptical when I was told that it had something to do with Moz Local.  I'll take a look at the video - thanks for the suggestion!