Google rankings tanked....Now what?

[BitABliss]

We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too.  Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps?

Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com

Here is a little history:
The site that’s been running for about 2 years.  We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental  growth.  It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month.

Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated.

Thanks!

-Shawn

[randfish]

Hi Shawn - it looks to me like the biggest issue is lack of quality links. I think what may have happened is that your on-site efforts, relaunch and start of link building efforts gave you a short term boost that's now ending. I looked through your links at Yahoo! and with OpenSiteExplorer (the latter is usually slower in finding new ones), and there's only a very small number and from only a few sites.

I'd work on earning those citations from quality sources and over time, you'll likely regain some of those rankings. Many SEOs have, in the past, observed something akin to a "fresh boost" and I suspect that's what happened here.

BTW - this link building tip in particular might be useful - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local - in addition to the local links, you can likely get lots of good direct links, too.

[DiamondJewelryEmpire]

Rand so what you saying is that the most important part of SEO is a link building?

[randfish]

No - definitely not. I'm saying that for competitive search results, having a good site and good content isn't enough. You need to show the engines that you're also an important, well-referenced resource and that means citations (links, tweets, shares, mentions, news articles, local citations, etc).

Links are important, but link building without the basics of a good site and business (which Bitabliss.com seems to have) is folly.

[DiamondJewelryEmpire]

So lets say when you done optimizing your website the only way to move in ranks is getting new links?

[randfish]

Links is a bit narrow - I'd say citations of any type. We've seen examples where having a site's name brand mentioned in a news article led to a flurry of crawling and higher rankings. It's also the case that adding new content to your site, making it a better converting site, improving usability, design, navigation, etc. can all have positive impacts on your ultimate goals and on SEO, too - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

[DiamondJewelryEmpire]

adding new content, such as?

[BitABliss]

Rand,

Thanks! I had a feeling links were going to be going to be high on the list. I'll head that direction.That is one of things I see as a huge advantage the big franchise outfits have. Do you think there is anything to this "reshuffling" that I think I see? For several keywords where the big chains were near the top, we all seem to have been pushed down.

Thank you!

Shawn

[BitABliss]

In our case, new content comes in the form of blog posts, tweets and FaceBook updates. The goal is a minimum two blog posts per month with topics that are related to our business (tips hints, products) or community focused (events, current affairs, etc).

[randfish]

Certainly possibly that it was a small algo shift, but unless lots of other sites fell in the rankings, too, I'd say the fresh boost/loss is the more likely culprit in this case.

BTW - you might want to check out this slide deck for some ideas on growing content/links/inbound marketing: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/inbound-marketing-for-startups-in-2011