rank drop quadrant Archives

Lost your Google Search Rankings? Tactics to Recovery using the “Rank Drop Quadrant”

Google Search Ranking Drop Quadrant

“Sean, I can’t find my site ranking anymore in the Top 10 in Google for ‘florida luxury homes’. What happened to my search rankings suddenly? Why have my Google rankings fallen so dramatically!”

“Why has traffic to my site suddenly dropped? I can’t find my site anywhere on Google?! What’s happening?”

Ask anyone who’s worked in the field of SEO for more than a couple of years and it’s more likely than not that he/she would’ve got an email like this from a client. You could find yourself in the same boat at any time and you want to be best prepared for it!

The world of SEO is complex and always subject to change. Nowadays, it’s become a fine art and requires a balance of both technical and creative strategies.

Implementing Topical Mapping to Regain Lost Google Search Rankings

Implementing topical mapping in your SEO strategy is an excellent way to regain lost Google search rankings. Topical maps represent the interconnectedness and relevance of various topics, subtopics, and keywords within your website content. They help visualize the structure of your content and ensure it aligns with search engine expectations.

When applying the principles of the “Rank Drop Quadrant” to your SEO recovery efforts, topical mapping can offer significant assistance. A well-structured website with clear topical mapping helps search engine crawlers to better understand your site, which can enhance your search ranking.

If the quadrant analysis points to keyword issues, topical maps can also help identify which keywords are most relevant to your website’s main topic and subtopics. By examining how these keywords are linked and how relevant they are to your overall content, you can adjust your keyword usage to improve your website’s SEO.

In cases where content quality has been identified as the culprit behind your rankings drop, a topical authority map can highlight content gaps or redundancies. This gives you the opportunity to improve the quality of your content by adding more depth to your existing topics or by exploring new, relevant subtopics. Ultimately, the visualization and insights provided by topical mapping can guide your efforts to regain your lost Google search rankings.

Google updates its search algorithm multiple times in a year with possible incremental changes happening every day. As an example, way back in February 2012, they made 40 updates to their algorithm within a single month.

Here’s an infographic on the 9 Major Google Algorithm Updates Every SEO Webmaster Must Know.

So, you see, there’s a lot of scope for change, and as such, it stands to reason that there are always random fluctuations in the SERPs. It happens all the time: one day your rankings are sky-high, and a few days later, you drop a dozen or so positions and your revenue starts to plummet.

First, let’s fire off an accusation.

Not at anyone per se, but more of a statement of fact as we see it. Rank Trackers today are slightly misleading when it comes to telling you how to measure your search engine rankings. I’m not implying that the data they’re presenting is wrong – not at all. But more along the lines that the data they’re presenting is too literal. Measuring your ranking performance based on just search positions isn’t as insightful anymore as opposed to a ranking metric with intelligence behind it.

Let me explain.

Data is only relevant when it can communicate an insight beyond the obvious. Imagine a scenario where two companies are competing online. Company A is doing all it can to rank higher and in the SERPs, their site is ranking higher. But. Company B is working smarter. Through better optimization techniques, they’re managing to pull in more traffic with a lower SERP ranking. If you were to ask any digital marketer or SEO professional, they would tell you that Company B is doing a better job since it’s able to extract more ROI from it SEO efforts. (Although I’m loathe to admit that for some clients, Company A is the way to go. Sigh.)
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How to effectively deliver bad news to your SEO clients and yet keep them happy?

Make SEO Clients Happy & Retain Them

This is the second post in a two-part blog series. If you haven’t already done so, do read the first part about how you can use the Rank Drop Quadrant to analyze why rankings have fallen.

If you are an SEO consultant or professional, it is an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable situation: something goes wrong, the client’s search rankings drop and you then need to communicate the bad news to your client. After all, it is part of your job to manage your SEO clients expectations and to keep them happy. Retaining your client can be hard at such times, especially when you would be the first person they would blame for any sudden drop in their rankings/traffic. So it’s important and necessary that you deal with such situations tactfully and communicate such bad news carefully.

As we covered in the first part, if you are dealing with lost google rankings for your SEO client, you may first want to use the Rank Drop Quadrant to analyze what could’ve gone wrong. It’s good to be able to map the situation out in your head and know how bad (or not bad) the situation is before communicating such news to your client.

So, now that you have gone through the Quadrant and understood the possible reasons for the drop, it’s time we communicate this information to our client/boss in the right way. After all, the cost of losing a client is much higher than acquiring new ones.

1. Skip the Denial Stage

Imagine the situation: you go into the office on a Monday morning only to find that your client’s website has dropped for all keywords in the SERPs. What do you do?

The inclination is probably to tell everyone that if anyone calls, you’re not in the office. In truth, that’s the absolute worst thing you can do. You need to call the client before they call you. Yes, they might get very vocal about their level of disappointment and unhappiness but they will also appreciate the fact that you noticed straight away when things went wrong. Communicating bad news is always better when done as soon as possible, you then have enough time to deal with recovering from the situation instead of wasting time denying the situation. Read More