Are you worried that your fascinating web-site is not being shown on the first page of Google search engine? Well, you might be wondering what is the reason behind this. Obviously, in some cases it is really difficult to find out why the SEO “attraction” of your web-site went down. It can easily happen that only tiny parts of your web-page may cause the entire site to lose its attractiveness.
So, how can you possibly keep track of all the things that affect your web-site’s Internet popularity? What can you do to eliminate any problems on your way? If you are asking yourself such questions, the following blog is for you; here, you will find concrete and detailed answers to these disturbing questions.
What you will get to know:
- how to handle the decline in your web-site’s SEO “attractiveness”
- how to detect those parts of your page that are affected the most
- how to process the relationship between the algorithmic updates of Google and decreases of your page’s visibility
- how to know whether the loss of reversed links is not the cause of downgrading rating
- how to identify whether the search engine launched multi-sectional “shake”
- how your competitors gained from the losses you encountered
- how to change your devastating position
Google Analytics: Identifying Problems With Search Engine
You might know that Google Analytics is a vital tool when it comes to dealing with such problems. Let’s take a look at what GA (Google Analytics) offers us.
- Should you even worry?
GA is the best possible way to know for sure whether you have any SEO related problems. As soon as your page got impacted by any problems, the effectiveness of your web-site will inevitably go down, which will be shown through the means of GA. Therefore, such analysis will enable you to study the problem and its seriousness.
- See what parts of the page got damaged the most
If you detected any problems, you have to check out the “Section Content”. By doing this, you will be introduced to the areas of your page that the problem influenced the most. Keep in mind that organic traffic is the graph that you have to deeply analyze; don’t waste your time looking at the general statistics.
Starting with the most popular content and ending with the least demanding – that’s the most effective approach to scrutinize statistics. Look for pages that lost the most of visibility; compare up-to-date information with a former one (when there were no signs of upcoming problems).
If you check the statistics of the latest years, it will surely yield its results. Having done this, you will see if a current problem was not caused by the previous falls of attractiveness from your potential clients.
- Evaluate mobile adaption of your web-site
Bearing in mind that a vast majority of users are frequently using tablets or phones to explore the beauty of Internet, the mobile adaption of your page is highly important. Algorithms can lower the visibility of your page; specifically, due to the poor mobile adaption.
In order to study this parameter, go to “Audience” > “Mobile” and tick the “mobile graph”. After that, enter the “Plot Rows” (show on a diagram).
Are there any suspicious areas on the diagram? Is mobile diagram represented as a diminished copy of a central session graph?
Searching Console Of Google: How Can You Confirm Your Apprehensions
Google Search Console (GSC) offers you a big variety of useful functions. Specifically, it is an irreplaceable tool when it comes to seeking for SEO-losses in certain areas and their approximate evaluation.
- Applicability of your web-page to mobile devices
GSC happens to be one of the most effective ways to check whether your web-page is suitable for cell-phones, computers or tablets.
In order to do this, enter the system and type the links of those pages that, allegedly, suffered the most. For instance, it could be the pages with low traffic; the ones that you detected through the means of Google Analytics. If your resource is based on the WordPress system, the root of a problem may be located in the certain sections of your web-page; one of the pages of your forum or blog and sections with goods’ description.
In most cases, provided information may be enough to access the general situation. If one of the pages is not adopted to mobiles, the entire functionality of the site can be questioned. Provided that alike problems exist, needed corrections must be applied to cure the problem.
- Manual sanctions?
GSC will help you to detect whether any sanctions were directed at your web-resource. To get aware of such data, go to “Search Traffic” > “Manual Actions”. If everything is under control, you will see the following:
Otherwise, you will be shown this:
- Displays in search engine
At times, Google Search Console may present quite controversial data about the displays. In general, Google bases its figures about display data on the quantity of times your web-page was requested by Internet users.
Subsequently, it would be fair to mention that any problem related to SEO “attraction” will be displayed on the graphs that GSC offers. Go to “Search Traffic” > “Search Queries” and you will be able to see the corresponding graphs.
Obviously, if stagnations in Internet popularity are clearly shown, some corrections are utterly needed.
- The state of your brand
The last thing you can do using GSC is study the data related to your brand. Such analysis will make it clear whether the fall in your web-resource’s SEO “attractiveness” is linked with a decreasing interest of Internet community towards your company.
In order to do this, go to “Search Traffic” > “Search Queries” and filter the list in a way that shows only the results linked to your brand/company name. Identify general tendencies and analyze what caused problems to appear.
SEMrush: Search Of Problematic Key-words
Now, as you know that your web-resource encountered poor visibility in a certain search engine, you may start figuring out the causes of this. Moreover, you have to try to look at this problem from a different perspective – eliminate key-words that could have been a main source of the problem.
- Check how your key-words are ranged
Unfortunately, GA will be quite futile in this case – the policies of Google prohibit this kind of researching.
However, SEMrush has nothing against the demonstration of your key-words’ arrangement. In order to get access to this data, you need to enter “Organic Research” > “Position Changes”. The graph, which you will be introduced to, is dedicated to the movements (increases/decreases) of your key-words’ arrangement.
By choosing certain dates, you will be presented with specific key-words that got damaged most heavily.
Apart from this, we thoroughly advice you to pay close attention towards “Position Explorer” that happens to resemble SEMrush to a great extent. Having compared the weaknesses and strong sides of both programs, you will be able to choose the most suitable for you.
If graph shows sustainable ratings, you will find it beneficial to check the general volume of requests that concern your key-words. Keep in mind, though, that quite frequently general slowdown in the market happens to be one of the reasons why your key-words are not backed up by a great amount of requests. For instance, if your competitors have just flooded the market with new goods, the attractiveness of your products will be substantially diminished; the Internet community will turn its attention to newly produced goods, rather than old ones.
Panguin Tool: Should We Blame Algorithmic Updates?
The service that Panguil Tool renders is extremely unique and useful; it allows establishing the relationship between the fall in your SEO “attractiveness” and Google’s updates. To use this service, you have to log in with your account to GA and choose one of your profiles in Google Analytics.
Panguin Tool will study your Google’s algorithmic updates and their interpretations on your organic traffic. If you detect any correlations, you will have to analyze the latest updates and understand what should be done/altered/fixed to avoid alike problems in the future.
Ahrefs: Search Of Lost Links
In order to complete this type of work, use “Site Explorer”. Looking through the data of your web-resource, you may find an eye-catching diagram called “New & Lost Blacklinks” that tells you about new and lost reversed links.
If something seems to be non-understandable, you can always use the section “Inbound Links” to find additional data. Find “Links” – “New/Lost”. Having entered the page, choose the weeks when problems first appeared; look through the links that got lost during this period.
At the same time, you have to pay close attention towards the “bigger picture” of what is happening. Create a pie chart using the data; it will help you identify the areas that got damaged most seriously.
Having covered this, try to establish whether there is any link between new info and the data that you obtained earlier (incorporating GA).
It is widely known that each link is unique in its nature. Consequently, if you lost at least one link of a format “.edu”, it can lead to the serious fall in your ratings. Alternatively, you can get rid of 100 commentary links and your web-popularity can even increase.
Here are one of the most proliferated reason of links’ loss:
- You may have forgotten that your cooperation with the web-resource came to an end
- Old links could have been taken down due to the publication of new content
- The link got deleted by a moderator
- Technical defects
SimilarWeb: How Can You Monitor Your Competitors?
It can happen that your competitors’ activity caused your SEO “attractiveness” to go down. “SimilarWeb” enables you to understand to which extent your competitors influence your productivity.
Go to main instrument and compare your web-resource to your competitors’ one. If needed, type in the timeframe that you got earlier by the means of GA. Again, try to seek for the correlation between competitors’ growth and your stagnation.
Also, using “Ahres”, you may find a concrete flow of changes due to the activity of your potential “marketing enemies”.
WayBack Machine: Content Assessment Of Your Competitors
If growth of others is one of the reasons of your fall, it would be beneficial for you to study the structure of their web-resources; specifically, study the content that got altered/refined lately.
Coming back to SEMrush, you can detect the correlation between the top content of competing firms and their arrangement of key-words. Then, use “WayBack Machine” to find out what techniques competitors use to increase their SEO “attractiveness”.
In most cases, you will definitely notice that your competitors put a lot work and thought into the SEO-promotion. Thereby, their web-resources can serve as inspiring examples for your own growth and development.
Quick Technical Checks
We have already listed a significant amount of valuable indicators/instruments that can be used to eliminate the problems with your SEO “attractiveness”. In spite of this, there are still some concepts that worth being paid attention to; if only you want to achieve the highest possible results with your web-resource.
If you don’t want all of your efforts to become worthless, you have to rate your web-site from the perspective of technical defects:
- Check a file called “robots.txt” and make sure that you don’t block any URLs or bots
- Apply the same analogy to “.htaccess”
- Come back to GSC to check whether the quantity of pages named “404.Error” hasn’t increased. Apart from this, look at the amount of indexed pages of your web-resource
- If you use strong redirects, make sure that they are actualized using code 301, which is perceived as constant by search engines
- Check your canonical URLs. Do they redirect to needed pages?
- Make sure that you don’t have “competing” pages that use key-words from the same list. If there are such pages, combine them into one, more powerful one.
It goes without saying that there are different reasons that explain why such defects emerge; newly-installed plugins, themes or CDN service can be among them. In addition to this, there is always a certain degree of probability that your web-site got hacked. Consistent tests and revisions of your web-resource are incredibly important; they can prevent you from dealing with even more serious issues.
Let’s sum it up
As soon as you detect a significant fall in your SEO “attractiveness”, you have to make needed observations and answer the following questions:
- What sections got damaged the most?
- What are the reasons of an encountered problem?
- Are competitors to be blamed for this?
- How to fix this situation, taking all the possible methods into account?
