6 Things You Should Do If You Are Having An SEO Emergency

We all know that Google is always coming up with new updates and new changes to its algorithms. The fact that your website is on the first page of SERP or in the top 5 doesn’t guarantee that you will have the same ranking in an hour or the next day. If your site’s rankings unexpectedly dropped over a short period of time then you are most likely to have an “SEO EMERGENCY”.

I have put together a list of steps you should take if you are having an “SEO EMERGENCY”.

1. The first thing you should do is to log in to Google Search Console or Webmaster Tools and check if there are any messages or warnings. There could be a variety of messages in the Search Console. You might be penalized as spam. You might have accidentally restricted search engine bots to crawl your site or to have access to specific files and folders. If that’s the case you can make adjustments to robots.txt right in the search console.
2. Talk to your development team. Maybe they made changes on the site that had a direct influence on SEO. Examples could be creating duplicate pages, adding javascript on some pages, or simply just making changes to the content without your knowledge.
3. If you don’t see any obvious issue that you can fix, you need to check the backend of your site. There are many great SEO tools out there that will give you full reports within minutes. One of the best tools is Screaming Frog. It’s an SEO spider tool and crawler software. It literally takes a few minutes to install the software on your computer and to run the report. The report gives you detailed information about every page of your site: status codes, title tags, description tags, internal and external links, H1 & H2, URLs, images, and much more. Play with it. Fix your 404 pages, optimize your tags and the headers. Try to get the most out of that report.
4. Check your backlinks with MOZ spam score.  Make sure you are not getting any spammy links to your site. If so, create a list of those links and disavow them in the Search Console.
5. Hosting and server issues can be a cause for bad rankings. If your site was down over the night you might not even notice it, but search engine spiders would notice it if they came to crawl your site. That’s a bad sign and it can hurt your SEO. If your site starts loading slow or you notice other hosting and server-related issues contact them right away to fix the problems.
6. And finally, the last but probably the smartest thing for you to do is to contact Robb Digital if you are not comfortable doing all the previous steps by yourself. Our professional SEO team will do everything to get you back where you were if not higher.  Contact us now to learn how we can improve your rankings.