Drastic keyword position drop from time to time
-
Hey guys,
I'm having the following issue. My keyword position in SERP is usually 10-11 but sometimes (like once a month or so) it drops to like to position 46 or something of that kind. Why would that be happening and what can I do to avoid that stuff?
-
As a matter of fact, we've been ranking for the keyword for a few years. So, it can't be an issue. Thanks anyway.
-
Thanks for the help. Well, I am checking my keyword positions in SEO Administrator. So, it cannot be a personalized search. And thanks for the input why Google might be doing it!
-
Do you have the dates of the drops? Panda would kill a clients SEO for about 2 weeks and then they have rebounded. This has happened for the last 3 rollouts.
If not, then it is something else. are you making any changes before the drops
-
Are these keywords that you have started ranking for recently? I have been having this kind of fluctuations with new keywords, too
-
I've had some keywords that do a flip flop like that just before they take a big jump up a few positions. My thought is that Google is testing how the SERPS would do without your site present and see if there is another site that would get more clicks. Somehow it takes that information and determines that your site actually is valuable and then they promote it.
On the other hand, are you absolutely sure this is not a personalized search issue? When the keyword drops, does your traffic drop as well? (That might be hard to judge as there is not a whole lot of difference between positions that are not on the first page). It would be interesting to see if the keyword appears lower when you are not logged in to Google. You may already know this, but to test if the search is personalized, add &pws=0 to the url and hit enter and then see if you are still in your higher position.
-
It's called fluctuation and there isn't much you can do about it to be honest, just keep building good links and hopefully it should stabilise. You should try Social Bookmarking as that can work wonders.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved URL Crawl Reports providing drastic differences: Is there something wrong?
A bit at a loss here. I ran a URL crawl report at the end of January on a website( https://www.welchforbes.com/ ). There were no major critical issues at the time. No updates were made on the website (that I'm aware of), but after running another crawl on March 14, the report was short about 90 pages on the site and suddenly had a ton of 403 errors. I ran a crawl again on March 15 to check if there was perhaps a discrepancy, and the report crawled even fewer pages and had completely different results again. Is there a reason the results are differing from report to report? Is there something about the reports that I'm not understanding or is there a serious issue within the website that needs to be addressed? Jan. 28 results:
Reporting & Analytics | | OliviaKantyka
Screen Shot 2022-03-16 at 3.00.52 PM.png March 14 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 10.31.22 AM.png March 15 results:
Screen Shot 2022-03-15 at 4.06.42 PM.png0 -
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period)
I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics
Reporting & Analytics | | Julia_a1a1 -
Drop in Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
Hi guys, I have recently seen a large drop in bounce rate (from GA) which seems unnatural for one of our clients website. Since the start of 2018, the bounce rate was consistently between 40-60%, and then saw a random spike, and now for the past two weeks, the bounce rate is below 10%. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas if this is a problem with GA, or the site itself. Site: https://www.zoomocarcredit.com/ Any comments/feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! Jack. SnP0Hc4
Reporting & Analytics | | ChemistryMarketing0 -
How Reliable is the Avg Query Position in GA?
Hi Moz Community, I wanted to know how reliable the average position data is for queries in Google Analytics search console report. I know this report is fairly new this year and the numbers are calculated a bit differently than they were in the old search engine optimization report. I want to know what the biggest differences are between this search console report vs. the old SEO report in GA. I'm also pretty confused about how GA reports on the average position. Obviously it's an average position of whatever date range your choose. But for instance, if your site shows multiples landing pages for one search query will it roll that into the average or just take the landing page that ranks higher? Does the position average take into account video or photo serp results and is this the average across mobile, desktop and tablet? This number has always been a guess since it's sampled data but I want to know how accurate it is. I read this article in 2014 (linked below) but I'm not sure if it all still applies now that that data might be presented differently. https://mza.bundledseo.com/ugc/testing-the-accuracy-of-avg-position-for-search-queries-in-google-webmaster-tools Any answers or discussions would be great here. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | znotes1 -
Why do WMT's Search Analytics & GA's Real Time Keywords Differ?
I took a screen shot of the keywords from Google Analytics Real Time Keywords for Google / Organic. Then I waited a week and filtered Google Webmaster Tools' Search Analytics for queries with those keywords. None of them showed up. Why not? What I missing? Why do some keywords show up in Google Analytics RT for Google / Organic while most others are in Not Provided? I see WMT's Search Analytics says that it doesn't always show queries that "are made a very small number of times or those that contain personal or sensitive information." But most of my queries are like that. Anybody know any patterns / criteria that leads WMT to show some but not others? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | GilReich0 -
Extracting long-tail keyword conversion terms
Hi all, Does anyone have any concise info on how to extract long-tail (or any) terms in Google Analytics that have converted for me as I am having a hard time finding out how to do this? Many thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Martin_S0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Ranking on page 1 position 3 but hardley any visits
in one of my projects the expected vistors is around 23000 weve got the keyword onto the first page position 3 and weve only recieved 30 vistits this month, my qustion is why? are the local searches from google analtics that tell you thier are 23000 searches for that keyword false please can someone shed some light on this, my client is totally over the moon with his ranking but cant believe that hes only recieving 30 visits this month from what we thought was a million dollar keyword
Reporting & Analytics | | Westernoriental0