Attempts to fix MOZ recommended issues resulted in drastic ranking drop.

[RuffHaus]

I have a website built in SquareSpace. https://www.ruffhaus.com/

I recently started working with MOZ to track and improve organic SEO. After my initial site crawl, search visibility was reported at a waping 2.38%. Moz showed several critical crawler issues. Most were redirect, 4xx and long URL. So I started working on fixing the redirect and 4xx issues first. I thought this was a good thing. But now my already sad search visibility has dropped to .07% (-95.97%!). I also went from #1 on keyword, brand implementation plan (and 3 variations), to #27. What?

Wondering where I went wrong and how to remedy?

This is all new to me so I am sure I'm not providing all the info you need to answer my question. Hoping providing the site URL will help. Fire away!

[donsilvernail]

Hi RuffHaus,

Search visibility is a combination of your tracked keywords and where they rank on google, not your complete search visibility on google.

What i mean is if you only track 1 keyword and it has a number 1 position on google Moz will show your search visibility as 100% the more keywords you add that do not rank will lower your search visibility ranking. So if you have 10 keywords tracked an 1 ranks #1 on google but none of the other keywords rank at all your search visibility will be 10%.

Squarespace has some limited ability for technical seo but it is real hard with that platform to optimize completely as you are limited to what you can do.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

[RuffHaus]

Thanks Don, I do understand that concept. I just have this feeling I did something wrong when I was making those fix suggestions. It was a shocker to see that number drop. It has only been about a week so I'll try not to panic

[RuffHaus]

Thanks for the additional tips Meghan. I'll try those to see if I can bring my heart rate down from the initial panic

When you say the fluctuations normalize pretty quickley... what time frame are we talking about?

Also, should I avoid changing keywords in MOZ? or could you tell me a frequency maybe?

[meghanpahinui]

Thanks so much for the follow up question! I don’t have a specific frequency or timeline I can provide however, you can use Mozcast (http://mozcast.com/) as a resource to help determine how turbulent Google SERPS are for any given day. As far as changing your keywords in your Campaign, that would really be up to your discretion. Keep in mind though, that any time you add keywords to your Campaign, data won’t populate for those keywords until the following Campaign update.  If you add or remove keywords between each update, you may see significant fluctuations in your Search Visibility, too.