You’re probably on the lookout for anything that could harm your website’s search rankings, but you might not be aware of all the reasons why your search rankings could drop. These seven tips can help you to keep your company from losing its position in the search results.
1. Keep an eye on your backlinks
The quality of the websites that your backlinks are on has an impact on your search rankings, which means that backlinks from low-quality sites can be extremely damaging to your rankings. Luckily, it’s possible to easily mitigate any potential damage to your search rankings by using the “disavow link” feature that Google offers.
How often do you need to check on the websites that your backlinks come from?
Ideally, you should check them at least every couple of weeks. Websites can change quickly, and while some of these changes could improve your rankings, some of them could have the opposite effect as well and cause serious damage to your search rankings.
What are some signs that a site has changed for the worse?
If you notice that a website you have a backlink on has begun selling questionable or controversial products or services, it has probably changed for the worse in a manner that could harm your search rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. As a result, it’s important to act immediately to disavow the link through Google. It isn’t just websites with a poor reputation that you need to be concerned about, which is because sites that offer irrelevant information or products can be harmful to your rankings as well.
2. Zombie pages can wreck your search rankings
A zombie page is any page that is not getting a significant amount of traffic, which means that it contributes nothing to your site and only harms your rankings. In most cases, these pages should simply be deleted.
What are some common types of zombie pages?
In some cases, zombie pages are simply parts of your website that haven’t happened to resonate as well with your audience as you hoped they would. However, another common example of a zombie page would be a page that advertises services that you no longer offer. Not only would the latter be an example of a zombie page that could be damaging to your search rankings, but people who come across the page could become interested in the services that you no longer offer, which could result in a very disappointed customer.
What can you do about zombie pages?
In most cases, zombie pages should be deleted. However, if the page discusses a topic or service that your customers are simply not very aware of, it may be possible to keep the page and provide your customers with more information about the service on your home page.
3. Always ensure that your website has SSL
SSL is important for securing your website, which gives customers confidence that your site is safe to use. As a result, search engines will be more likely to give your site a high ranking. Luckily, getting an SSL certificate is easy since many hosting providers offer them for an affordable price.
What exactly is SSL?
SSL is also known as secure sockets layer, which means that it protects communications between your server and your customers. As a result, it’s harder for hackers to intercept the data, which can significantly improve your site’s security and trustworthiness.
SSL will improve your conversion rate
SSL makes your site appear much more trustworthy in the eyes of consumers, which means that more people who visit your site will be inclined to make a purchase. The combination of a higher conversion rate and higher search rankings can be very beneficial for your company.
4. Take steps to solve issues with links and images
If you have broken links or images that don’t load, your rankings could suffer and customers could get frustrated. Not only does this include broken backlinks, but it also includes outbound links. In order to prevent broken links and images, it’s essential to make sure that you use the proper HTML. If you do not use the correct HTML for images and links, they will not work properly. Luckily, many hosting providers offer templates that include the necessary code, which can make it much easier to put links and images on your website that work properly.
Make your content mobile friendly
As a result of the popularity of mobile devices, ensuring that your images and videos show up properly on mobile devices is crucial, which is likely to be increasingly important in 2020. One issue to consider is that the screens on mobile devices are extremely small, which means that an image that’s too large can easily fill the entire screen of a smartphone. This results in a less than ideal experience for your site’s visitors. Also, certain types of scripts for video playing don’t tend to work right on mobile devices, such as JavaScript, which means that you should limit your use of these scripts if possible.
Use the right tags in your images
Not only is it important to use the right HTML code for the image itself, but it’s a good idea to include alt tags in your imagery as well. This can give your rankings a bit of a boost, which can be significant in some cases.
Ensure that outbound links are going to an active site
It’s not uncommon for websites to go offline at some point either temporarily or permanently, which means that you could have links on your website that will simply result in a 404 error if people click on them. This can be quite detrimental to your rankings, which means that you need to regularly check all of your outbound links to ensure that the sites they lead to are still active.
5. Keep an eye on your blog’s comment section
Moderating the content on your blog is crucial. If the blog section of your site isn’t well-moderated, the overall tone of the comments could potentially descend into incivility and inappropriate or off-topic remarks. This could damage your search rankings and reduce your conversion rate considerably. In order to effectively moderate your blog, you need to set rules for posters.
What should be the rules for posts on your blog?
It’s important to ensure that all comments that are posted on your blog are respectful of other commenters. Promptly remove any argumentative comments, harassing content, or troll posts. In addition, it’s important to ensure there isn’t any irrelevant material or spam. In some cases, spammers could even post links for products that are offered by a competitor, which could not only reduce your conversion rate but increase sales of the competition’s products. In addition, it’s important to have rules that forbid posters from uploading any content of an inappropriate nature.
What will happen if you don’t moderate your blog?
It’s impossible to predict what will happen, and that’s because you really never know what other people could choose to write. One or two bad comments could quickly lead to extensive arguments between posters, which could drive people away from your website and damage your rankings. In some cases, it could be very difficult to recover from the damage caused by bad comments that remained on your blog. Therefore, it’s essential to make sure that you look over the comments on your blog multiple times every day. Not only should you remove bad comments, but you should also block posts from individuals that have a history of posting offensive content.
6. Problems with your meta content can wreak havoc on your search rankings
The meta description for your page is exceptionally important, which is because it’s literally the first thing that potential customers will see on your site! In fact, people will see this information in the search results when they are looking for information about your company. However, keep in mind that the meta description has to be short, which is because only 135-160 characters of your content will show up in the meta description.
What makes a meta description poorly written?
Meta descriptions that are inaccurate will have an especially severe impact on your search rankings, which is because the content will be less useful if it isn’t what readers are looking for. Also, meta descriptions need to be engaging, and the content will be considered to be of low quality if it does not adequately attract and retain the attention of readers who may be interested in your products.
7. Issues with writing on your website
It’s important to make sure that you always try to be as engaging as possible when it comes to the writing on your website. If you hire a digital marketing expert, they’ll work hard to ensure that your content is just right for your audience, which will allow you to gain a significant amount of traffic with a high conversion rate.
What happens if you have low-quality content on your site?
Low-quality content will be seen as less useful by search engines, which will mean that your rankings will be reduced. This is more important than ever due to an update to Google’s algorithms called Google Panda, which has dramatically changed the way that Google ranks content.
What is considered low-quality content?
There are many reasons why content can be considered to be of low quality, but one common reason for this is keyword stuffing, which is putting an excessive number of keywords on your site in an attempt to boost your rankings. In general, a site is considered to be stuffed with keywords if more than 3% of its content is some form of keyword, which could even cause a search engine to remove your website from the search results.
However, sites can be deemed to be using keyword stuffing even if they do not have a keyword density that is this high, which could happen if the keywords do not fit into the content well. If the keywords tend to stand out a lot compared to the rest of the text, the material is likely to be deemed stuffed with keywords, which could be quite damaging to your search rankings. Therefore, it’s essential to make sure that the keywords fit into the content as smoothly as possible.
Another serious problem when it comes to the content on your site is bad grammar. Bad grammar can cause people to see your website as less reputable, which could negatively impact the image of your brand. Furthermore, issues with grammar can cause search engines to rank your website much lower. Problems with the organization of your content can be equally serious, which means that it’s essential to ensure that your website is as well-organized as possible.
How can you improve your content?
Not only can you take steps to improve the usefulness and quality of the content on your website yourself by making edits to the content, but there are several different types of professionals that can alter your content in order to ensure that it doesn’t detract from your rankings. Talented copywriters can ensure that the content you create is designed to sell, which will increase both your conversion rate and search rankings. In addition, experts on SEO can help you to effectively work keywords into the content, write content that’s specially designed to rank well on major search engines and make use of other SEO strategies, which can greatly boost your rankings. Also, graphic designers can improve the quality of the imagery on your website, which can help to boost your rankings.
The Collective Writers have just what you’re looking for
If you’re looking for information on digital marketing, The Collective Writers has exactly what you need to grow your business! In fact, our talented writers frequently create new content on the topic, which can provide information that allows you to boost your search rankings considerably and sell more products or get more clients. Subscribe to our website today and learn more excellent digital marketing techniques!
References
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-destroy-the-zombie-pages-that-are-creeping-on-your-website/