I regularly hear of clients being contacted by SEO agencies promising to get them to the top of Google’s search results page quickly. This type of digital marketing is infuriating for SEO account managers who, like myself, take a natural approach to optimisation. Forcing a site to rank in position one for a week or two is possible, but if your aren’t putting the time and effort in, eventually your will see your rankings tumble down the search results page leaving you back at square one.
In SEO there will always be slight ranking fluctuations, but if you are seeing massive leaps followed by substantial plunges; then you have a problem. When it comes to SEO, you have to play the waiting game to an extent. That is why we always recommend investing in both SEO and PPC to ensure that while our optimisations are taking effect, you aren’t losing out on valuable online conversions.
There are many reasons why your keywords won’t maintain a healthy position in the search results, below are just a few examples:
Keyword stuffing for quick results
Rather than working to gradually improve your rankings, resorting to keyword stuffing in a bid to increase your rankings quickly will never stand the test of time. This is the digital equivalent to flailing your arms around to try to get the teachers attention. You may find this works for a short time, but eventually a website with better health and keyword strategy will knock you back down the SERPs.
Page authority is completely ignored
Any quality digital marketing company will understand the importance of good site health for better rankings. Whilst working to increase your website’s domain authority is important for site health, your rankings could be suffering because individual pages do not have a high enough authority. In order to maintain rankings, you can’t simply rely on domain authority but need an in depth strategy to also improve the authority of individual pages.
Insufficient keyword research
Flipping the problem the other way, if you find that all your keywords are continually in the first position of the search results; this may not be a positive sign. It is easy to get keywords with little-to-no search volume to rank. Whilst this will make it appear that your digital marketing efforts are working, you will not gain any return on your investment from this method. If you invest in an SEO company, it is important to ask how they chose which keywords to target and what the search-volumes of these keywords are.
It is important to remember that maintaining great rankings isn’t just about strategically placed keywords. Fantastic SEO should be all-inclusive, that means that your technical, on-site, off-site, outreach and even PPC strategies need to work holistically if you want to stay ahead and reap the benefits ahead of your competitors.
If you or your digital marketing agency are struggling to maintain competitiveness with regards to your rankings or website health, why not invest in a free SEO review from one of our dedicated team members?