Top Reasons Why Your Keyword Rankings May Wickedly Fluctuate

If you are working on SEO, then you must have pretty much experienced how the keyword rankings ditch you and your efforts at SEO optimization. Even after monitoring the SEO for long times, the keyword rankings are a nervous wreck for days and weeks together. Although the everyday ranking may keep varying, you should not spaz out but focus on making long-term plans for better SEO results. The rankings may skyrocket from 30 to 10 in a day, but such fast-paced changes are very volatile and the opposite will happen soon to crush your happiness.

One of the best ways to not let such fluctuations steal your peace of mind is to know and understand why such things are happening, their root causes, and also, possibly the solution for it. With so many new companies coming up in the market, it takes a proper seo company to deal with such fluctuations and ranking issues. Here are a few reasons we think might be the cause for the rapid fluctuations of the SEO keyword rankings.

1. The Usual Google Fluctuations – Keyword ranking based on the competition on the Google search page is normal to a huge extent. If you are in the top 3 rankings on the first search result of Google, then it is anticipated that your website is stable with just a few fluctuations amongst the competitors. If your page ranking is in the teens or twenties, the fluctuations will be within that range. So, the solution for this could be to focus on improving the overall website ranking for the Google Search results. This could be done by working to improve the traffic by making the website more creative, adding more relevant content, and other ways to engage the customer.

2. Algorithm Changes/Updates – Google, the largest and the most used search engine keeps changing or updating its algorithm frequently. Google rolls out occasional updates like the Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird, etc., which are ways of implementing better machine learning techniques and their adaptations into their algorithm. With each change comes fluctuation for the SEO. Although minor changes take just a day or two to adapt, major changes may take a longer time for adapting. Like the normal Google search engine fluctuations, there is not much one can do about it.

1. Viral trends – The trending topics keep changing constantly. Any sudden change in the trending topic will cause a shuffle in the rankings. The fluctuation will depend on many factors including how popular the current topic is and how relevant is your website content and SEO keywords with the trending keywords. Since the viral trending topics are unpredictable, there is nothing much you can do about these too other than improving the relevancy of the content to the current viral trending keywords.
2. New Competitors – The SEO rankings may change due to the introduction of a new competitor in the market. Having a new competitor or a change in the competition will affect the SEO keyword rankings to a considerable level. The new competitor will bump the SEO rankings for everyone and since there are so many sudden and new competitors coming in the market every day, there will be a lot of fluctuations from Google’s side of picking and positioning them accordingly. This is also something which you cannot avoid or change and will have to just go with the flow until the competitor sinks or floats up.
3. Changes in Content – Google works by indexing the content on your website and then ranks it depending on the keywords and their relevancy with the top ranking keywords. So, when there is a change in the website content, be it by adding new content or removing some content, the Google machinery will trigger some changes and it will determine the change in the SEO rankings. As obvious as it is, good and relevant content will improve your SEO rankings, whereas, bad and irrelevant content will decrease the SEO rankings of the website.
4. Site Compromise – A dramatic change in the SEO ranking will occur when your site is compromised, or in other words, if it is hacked. Most hackers will leave some sign to show that your website is compromised which could tank the SEO rankings or worse, it could remove you completely from the index. Apart from removing the hacker’s signs indicating a compromise, you will have to deal with a lot more like fixing the loopholes that let the hacker in at the first place.
5. Link Audits – Google ranks your website by the number of links to and from your website and so, links become an important backbone for your SEO rankings. So, it is essential to analyze the network of the site links. It is more like detoxifying the links by performing an audit. With the analysis results, you can keep a check on the bad links and remove them or retain the good links for better rankings.
6. Search Penalties – Another important reason for causing fluctuations could be due to the search penalties. When Google pushes an update and your site is lacking it, Google may apparently take an action against you by applying a penalty. Too many negative penalties will bring down your search engine ranking. You will have to keep an eye on such fluctuations and act accordingly.

The basic rule for a fluctuating SEO rank will be mainly because of a change, either from your side or from Google’s side. Although it is natural for the Google changes to affect the ranking, if it is from your website’s side, you will have to analyze well and work towards it. The fluctuations will range from a couple of days to a couple of weeks depending on the cause. It is essential that you analyze well and focus on improving the SEO rankings by adapting well to the changes. Any reputable SEO company will tag up and do this for you.