Watching your SERPs Positions – When to Worry

We all know things change. We all know all search engines are not exactly alike. Number one in Yahoo may be number two in Google, and fourth on Bing. What about when you plummet from number one or two to page two or four or six? When do you start to panic?

When we spend endless hours and thousands of dollars on our website’s online promotion, it is only natural to be anxious about the results and our website’s performance online. Keeping a close tab on the performance of our website and its rankings is very important, and you should never be blindsided by swings in rankings!

Search engine rankings and top positions fluctuate fast, and vary from engine to engine. Sometimes you will find only a minor variation between engines, but at other times you may see a vast difference within a short period of time. Unless you keep track of these fluctuations you can’t plan your next course of action.

Checking your website’s pagerank in Google toolbar once a month is not enough! You need to make sure that you constantly check your ranking for all the keywords for which you have optimized. If you don’t check regularly You might be under the presumption you are ranking high in the search results page for a particular keyword when this is not the case.

Your conversions and your traffic rate can plummet and you will waste valuable time trying to track down the source of the problem. Stay on top of it, and avoid nasty surprises by nipping possible slippings in the bud. If you notice that your rankings have dropped down in good time then you will be able to reinforce your efforts and restore the site’s ranking for that particular keyword.

Some websites can be quite seasonal -holiday gifts and any other website that does brisk business around a holiday cannot afford to be pushed down during that holiday season. If you don’t keep a tab on the position of such keywords, you will miss out on your opportunity that year and be forced to wait for next year before you can get that kind of traffic again and increase your conversion rates.

It is also not enough to keep track of your rankings in just one search engine. You MUST check the rankings for Yahoo and Bing as well. You may see minor variations and freaking out is not needed – although more reinforcement is highly recommended.

However, if you find a drastic difference such as being pushed from page 1 to page 3 of the search results then you need to review your website and find the problem area. If you are paying regular attention to your website’s ranking, you can save your website from major drops in the position. Just never use black hat tactics to artificially change your position! This can result in real openalties, and leave you worse off than before.