Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Since the turn of the year, many website owners have been experiencing volatile rankings with sites facing instability in day-to-day keyword rankings. This volatility has gradually progressed throughout the year, with some sites now experiencing steep ranking drops with historically strong keywords, completely falling out of the rankings before appearing back the day after.
In his article on the current ranking volatility, Barry Schwartz shows several different Google Tracking tools that demonstrate the increasing volatility of the SERP in recent months.
Semrush Sensor is a tool that lets you track Google ranking volatility over a selected period. As we can see, since the middle of February, in the UK, the SERP has seen very high levels of volatility, which has not let up for the entirety of March.
This means that at the moment, despite your best SEO efforts, you may be seeing some strong ranking swings that are out of your control. It’s important at these times to weather the storm and wait for the ranking volatility to stabilise before assessing your performance. If you feel your rankings are suffering in the long term, not just the interim period, then looking into ways you can improve or pivot your SEO approach would be astute.
How to Contain Ranking Volatility
As mentioned, while rankings are currently volatile, you should be thinking about the macro rather than the micro, not focusing too much on your rankings on a day-to-day basis, but making sure you are taking care of things under your control, such as:
- Expanding Content
- Keyword Targeting
- Internal and External Linking
- Improving Site Speed
- Improving UI
If you’re consistently focused on improving your site from an organic SEO perspective and improving your authority, trustworthiness and content, your rankings will trend upwards if you’re doing a good job, but the rise will never be smooth, and all sites face fluctuations and ranking drops, especially in high volatility search environments, the key to maintaining your trajectory over time is focusing on refining your SEO approach.
