What Website Monitoring Has to Do with Your Search Engine Rankings

Most of today’s savvy online entrepreneurs know that website monitoring service is crucial to the up-time success of a website. After all, every single second of downtime in the e-commerce world equates to profits lost. How much money you lose per minute depends on the volume of sales your online business makes, but any lost profit is too much when it comes to profit loss that could have been avoided in the first place.

With website monitoring service in place, you know about website downtime the moment it happens, which means you can get to work to get your site back up and running sooner rather than later. In some cases, a quality website monitoring service can even prevent downtime occurrence by detecting the performance issue that usually signify that downtime is near. What some online businesses do not realize, however, is that website monitoring services can actually help you maintain your search engine rankings as well as protect your business’s profits. If you have been under the impression that website monitoring service is only good for avoiding unnecessary downtime, there are some things you need to consider.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Back before search engine algorithms changed, webmasters used to experience severe anxiety over the fact that their website may be down when Google did its once-a-month crawl of the site. If the website was down when that monthly bot crawl was performed, search engine rankings could be kissed goodbye. Thankfully that is no longer the case, but excessive downtime can still wreak havoc on the search engine results that you have gained through blood, sweat, tears, and likely a lot of SEO investment dollars.

Nowadays Googlebot regularly assesses websites, rather than only crawling them once a month. If a site is down when the Googlebot crawls it, that doesn’t necessarily mean an instant drop in search engine rankings. If, however, a site is down for a couple of weeks or if it is consistently slow in response or the bot consistently runs into performance problems or other errors, your search rankings will indeed take a dive. This is especially true for "twerking" sites (sites that repeatedly go up and down so quickly it may not be readily apparent that the site is experiencing significant amounts of downtime without a website monitoring service in place). This is because Google does not want to direct its visitors to websites where they are likely to encounter a poor user experience. Because of this, it is more important than ever to ensure that not only is your site not experiencing excessive amounts of downtime, but that when your site is up it is up and running properly. If you do not monitor and assure your site’s up-time and performance, your hard-earned search engine rankings could indeed become a thing of the past.

Website Monitoring Service to the Rescue

The only way to determine the exact nature of the downtime and performance issues your site may be facing is to having a quality website monitoring service in place and keeping an eagle’s eye on your business’s website 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If your site is experiencing downtime or performance issues, your website monitoring service will let you know about the problems and you will be able to determine what you need to do to make sure they are handled properly. While the best website monitoring services usually aren’t free, when you consider how much they can save in lost profits and the way in which these services protect your SEO and search ranking investments, website monitoring services are truly one of the few websites services that can actually more than pay for themselves in the tangible results they provide.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.