Page 2 on Google Ranking Blues

Are you stuck on page 2 of Google and cant seem to get to page 1? Do you watch your competitors stay on page 1 and you just can figure out why you are unable to beat them?

Does your SEO company promise you that this is a small hiccup and that you’re going to get to page one in a matter of time?

If you have those page 2 ranking blues and can’t seem to crack it big time on page 1 then you need to look at what’s going on with your SEO campaign.

If you are forever stuck hovering between the top and bottom of page 2 then you know what I am talking about. One day you might be excited because you see your SEO rankings start to shoot up to the very top of page 2, just at the cusp of venturing into the unchartered waters of page 1. Then all of a sudden you check your keyword ranking and you start to move back down the page. This is when you start to wonder what is happening with your online marketing.

This is unfortunately very common and happens all the time. Rankings fluctuations like this are extremely common and what you find is that the only positions that seem to remain unaffected are those in the top 3 positions. The rest are very volatile. For a lot of small businesses it’s hard to remain competitive and plan for the future with these types of fluctuations.

If your in a niche market and you have been in business a long time your rankings should by their very nature of Google be pretty solid. That is, you shouldn’t be overly concerned about too much up and down activity. That is, unless there enters into the market a lot of new players who want your position. Then you may start to see your rankings take a dip.

Alternatively, if you are in a highly competitive niche where everyone is scrambling to get to page 1, you are definitely gong to see some real bounces in your position unless you can come up with a great strategy to stabilise things a bit.

Unfortunately, in this day many businesses are looking for the quick option and this also goes for search engine optimisation. Businesses all over Sydney want the best deal they can find and in the case of SEO, this can have a damaging effect on your internet marketing. Reason being, the cheaper options generally lead to cutting corners and implementing what is termed ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. Those people reading this blog and have used a few companies in the past will know exactly what I’m talking about. They made the grave mistake of taking one of these cheap SEO agencies on board and have paid the price of not being able to get their rankings above a certain level. In most cases, they will see a slight improvement in their position but over time they start to see a pattern on ranking stability BUT NEVER ON PAGE 1.

Also read: Small Business SEO guide – Black Hat vs White Hat SEO

The problem gets compounded when we are called in to try and remedy the situation and what we find is a whole lot of messy, incredibly bad back links that will over time get de indexed and devalued by Google. Whilst this is a good thing in the short term, what this means is that your website will start to loose big rankings over the next 6 months to a year, as Google keeps viewing these thousands of links and starts to place zero value on them. All we can do is try to counter balance this with a proper back linking campaign.

Ways to improve your rankings

• make sure that your website is fully optimised for Google search. Keep load times to a minimum and make sure that there are no heavy graphics on you main landing pages.  You can check your websites load times here
• keep web content and this is site wide freshly updated with news and relevant information. If you have plagiarised content get rid of it quickly as this could be one of the main factors holding you back.
• Try to satisfy Googles algorithm called rank brain. This is the combination of quality backlinks and content. If anything, I would put more of an emphasis on quality content throughout your website. The rationale behind this is that the better the copy the more people willing to it naturally and hence your rankings will improve. The best way to achieve this is to go through your website thoroughly, check each page and make sure the content is rich with information. Wikipedia highlights RankBrain as the third main ranking factor with Google. So it’s vital that you fully understand it’s significance and the reasons why a violation of this could be inhibiting your rankings.
• Make sure all titles on your site are relevant to the page. This also includes meta descriptions.
• Audit all your back links and prune those that you seen as irrelevant or spammy. Those might have been placed there by your current SEO provider. This may be hard to do but it is an essential part of improving your rankings. You will immediately recognise a bad backlink as it’s one that has come from an unrelated and untrusted source. If you are unable to delete all links naturally then you need to disavow them and the following article is a must read: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

There are over 200 rankings factors that could be affecting your websites SEO perfeormance according to backlinko and to compound matters and make them seen insurmountable Google is forever changing these. But, one thing you should do to get out of the page 2 rut is to make sure your being as natural as you can with your site. A natural back linking profile and fabulous copy is really the only two ways to avoid ranking slumps. So my advice is to get cracking and start writing.