How to Retain Your Search Engine Rankings

Now that you have grabbed some high level rankings for some of your targeted keywords for your Website the challenge is now to retain these rankings. In general, most search terms people are searching for become competitive because your competition will want to rank for the keyword phrases that are most searched and relevant.

The question becomes: what steps can you take to help guarantee that you do not lose your rankings over time?

First let’s take Google’s search engine perspective in answering this question. What is Google’s number one goal in determining how they rank Websites for specific keyword phrases?  The answer is that Google has to give the most relevant results possible or they will lose their market share.  Google’s entire business model is based on this concept.

Google is very skilled at ranking sites relevant based on their ranking algorithm but the challenge for them is to recognize when a Website is no longer in business.  The issue that Google search engine has is that a company may go out of business but their Website is still live; this is very common.

It is very important for Google to not rank a Website in which the operator of the Website is no longer using the Website or the Website has become outdated.  If a person searching on Google search engine for a product or a service and they click on a Website within the result set  and that Website is no longer in business; this will reflect very negatively on Google and may cause this user to choose another search engine in the future.  Google desperately wants to avoid this problem.

As the Website operator it is important to continually tell Google that you are still in business and that your Website is continually relevant to the keyword phrases in which Google ranked your Website.  The best way to relay this information to Google is to change some of your content on your homepage on a regular basis.

By changing content regularly; this tells search engine Google that the Website is still live and the operator is still using the Website for their business or organization.

Content does not need to change on a daily basis in order to keep Google from decreasing your rankings or removing your listing all together.  Optimally changing content on a monthly basis is best but changing content every two to three months will suffice.

One way this can be accomplished is by simply changing the main content on your homepage, but this can be a bit of a pain to do since you most likely like what the content says and may not want to change it on a regular basis.  The search engine strategy is to develop content that can be easily changed on a regular basis.

Examples of content that is easily updated

• Include a testimonial on your homepage and change that testimonial on a regular basis
• Include company news on your homepage and keep this news updated on a regular basis
• Highlight a different product or service on a regular basis on your homepage
• Highlight a different employee on your homepage on a regular basis
• Include a coupon or a special offering that can be changed on a regular basis
• Include a case study on your homepage that you can change on a regular basis
• Value added content that will be beneficial to the Website visitor can change on a regular basis

It may be best to not just choose one type of content to change on a regular basis.  You may decide to change a testimonial one month then change your company news the next month.  It does not really matter what content you are changing but it makes a lot of sense to change some content regularly to continually tell search engine Google that you want your Website ranked.

– Jason