Vitaliy Gershfeld

There’s a method that many SEO experts and I know use which helps us to sell our services successfully. I’ll show you how we do it. This strategy works, 100%.

There are 5 core parts to this strategy and it is important to understand out of the 5, the first is the most important, because the others extend from that first one and allow you to have success and even attract clients easily, and in those circumstances, you don’t even need to sell them any SEO services, because they’ll ask you for it themselves.

Here is a preview of these 5 parts:

This 5 part process is something I’ve seen work again and again. And this has come from my experiences as well as from the other experts I’ve talked to who also practice this. After seeing the success play out so many times, I figured I can show you this within this post so you can try and do it too.

As you read this post, you will get specific instructions on each part as well as real examples of how they 100% work.

Mimic these 5 core parts and you will be able to do the following things:

You’ll be able to self SEO your own websites, and/or your online business and make enough money from it to not have to worry about doing that stuff for clients.

You’ll be able to easily convince potential leads that you know how to make their websites get better rankings, make more money and sell more services to them and of course, all while getting more word of mouth recommendations and obviously, more leads.

You’ll be able to scale this strategy to a point where it makes you a lot of money and possibly even grows into something like an agency.

Now I personally have experienced 4 out of the 5 parts above.

The only thing I haven’t yet done is start an agency and I likely never will because I enjoy working for myself and if people approach me (which happens often now) with requests to help them with their sites and businesses to get better traffic and more online profits, they are literally ASKING me to sell them my SEO services, in which case, I either give them recommendations to people who would help them with that, or sell them training programs to teach that.

While I am technically “missing out” on making a lot of money from single or multiple clients in the process, I have had enough experiences with clients in the past to know that it’s not something I enjoy doing. You may be of a different opinion on this subject, but while I am explaining the 5 parts, you will be able to see the benefits of each as well as the responsibilities they hold, and decide if you wish to…

• Have your own website or websites, do your own SEO work and profit that way (like I do).
• Have a website, but offer your SEO services to potential clients, and make good money with that approach.
• Have both and make your money that way (but you’ll find that you’ll probably need to hire people, because it’ll be too much to do yourself).

You’ll decide that later, but for now, let’s get to each part:

Part I: Become your own SEO expert, first and foremost.

No serious businessperson or individual is ever going to trust you or pay you good money to do SEO work for them IF they don’t believe you are actually an expert or get the recommendation from someone who believes in you.

And before you even approach a client and start trying to sell them services, you first need to actually be an expert.

I recommend you have at least 1 website that you can use as a resume to prove your worth as an SEO expert. This is seriously going to become the BACKBONE of your whole online business and act as a selling point. For instance, when I speak to people, if they ask for proof, I show them screenshots like this:

This is that “1 site” I have, which you also need to have if all the other doors and parts of this guide will open up to you. And I am very serious about this as I often see people trying to sell SEO services, without providing proof that they are themselves, experts. 

Some people even believe that if they study a few courses and watch a few videos on SEO, that this somehow qualifies them to do work. Well I’ve got some something to say about that:

It’s a different story when you create your own website, because that involves having to figure out the right way to do SEO and it’s very often the case that people study the wrong ways of doing it and end up having things like Google penalties hit them. You need to learn the right way to do your own SEO, and see success from it long term before you realize that you can help clients get these same results.

Here are some of the major things you need to practice and do to be considered an SEO expert:

The great news is that going through the EXPERIENCE of growing your own successful site via SEO helps prepare you to explain these things and solve these problems for the clients you’ll be getting later on.

It isn’t just the proof that your site is working that provides the value and confidence for someone to buy services for you, but it’s the confidence that your EXPERIENCE in this field insures the client’s investment is SAFE.

Here is what I recommend for part I:

There’s other important benefits to part I:

First, you are NOT reliant on getting clients because you are making money either way. 

The confidence you get from having your own successful SEO site is what makes selling the service EASIER to leads. When they hear your tone and how well you answer their questions or consult them, they’ll feel safe to invest with you and that confidence comes from the experience gathered from creating your own successful SEO site.

I have a ton of experience with more than just 1 website and have enough stories and experiences to showcase that when I discuss potentially working with someone. Because they see that I sound confident and explain things to them well, while also clearly seeing that I don’t care if I get them as a client or not, they are more likely to want to work with me.

Part II: You need to get at least 1 client. 

1 client’s investment in you can really provide a nice side income and depending on the work you do, even a full time one. But getting that first lead is often the most difficult part. 

However, if you follow through with part I’s advice on having your own page, it’s actually an easy and even seamless process. There are 2 ways to go about getting that first client and then selling your SEO services to them:

Option 1: Through friends, parties, and social gatherings.

I never like looking for leads and I have found this option works very well. When you become your own SEO expert and have that confidence, speaking about it to people at gatherings who ask “So what do you do?” is easy.

There is a high demand for existing businesses and even people to start their own sites these days and believe me, nearly every single person I’ve ever spoken to about the work I do has gotten their interest because the thought of them making their own website and making money from it is ALWAYS alluring.

However, one important point is this: Do NOT try to sell them anything when you’re speaking to them. The very act of doing this will likely push them away from you. 

Whenever I speak to people about the work I do, it’s always for an informative purpose and if they have a site or are thinking of starting one and ask me questions, I always speak with the goal to give them great information and arouse their interest further. I make NO points about selling, UNLESS they directly ask me.

Option 2: Involves finding businesses who have websites and mentioning you can improve upon it.

I have a friend named Eddy who has gotten himself a number of clients this way (he also focuses most of his work on his own site here). He walks into certain stores he likes, then checks out their website (in the store) and sees if it needs improvement. He then speaks to the owner or manager and says “Hey I noticed your store isn’t showing up here on Google or other places, and I actually help sites do that”. 

This usually results in an offer to do some free work, but with the intent to sell services on the back end and he’s done pretty well doing this.

Because as I said, I don’t like to go around and pitch my services and work on my own website, if there’s any offer that comes to me, it’s because of option 1.

The benefits of part II:

People inevitably talk about their work at social gatherings and I know from experience how popular making money from websites is based on the large numbers of people I’ve spoken to. Talking to them with confidence without selling your services, makes them more likely to reach out to you in the future with inquires about buying stuff from you.

Even if you speak to people who aren’t interested in your services, you will almost inevitably (from speaking to multiple people) get those who have friends who would be able to use your services and your name WILL be mentioned. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve gotten offers and requests from people to help improve their site because a friend of theirs showed them my site and/or said “Hey I know a dude who can help get your site more visits” and that’s ALL it took. And this is an EASY client to land.

Part III: Get 1 happy client and continue along with part II’s strategy.

If having your own successful website and experience from that is the most important backbone to your success in other parts, then having 1 happy client is the next most important thing, because:

There is at least financial stability from having 1 client pay you over and over (I’ll discuss ways you can monetize again and again from a single client further below).

That happy client acts as another proof of you being someone other businesses can trust.

The client can then go to their other business friends and/or mention you to their friends at a party or something.

Word of mouth is extremely important here and it WILL happen if you talk to people and get that 1 client talking about you, especially if they are happy with your work (they will brag about their business to friends and this will naturally arouse their interest in seeking you out). You will literally have to do 0 selling.

One of the first successful clients I did local SEO work for, was very happy when I came to them after analyzing their site and saying the very same things my buddy Eddy for other people. Yes I know I said I prefer the other option, but this exception was my first run in with getting a client and helping their site do well on Google.

That same client then asked me (FOR YEARS) to help them with other things and suggested me to other potential clients over and over. I turned them all down, because I just don’t have the time anymore, but the point is to showcase the POWER of what 1 happy client with their own connections can do for you, if you do a good job for them!

Part IV: Getting more clients on your own via paid ads and other methods.

If getting clients through word of mouth isn’t enough for you and you wish to get clients faster, one suggested method is creating your own site which advertises your services (and testimonials from the happy client/s). Setting up ads is easy across many networks if you have that experience and training (and you can get that from part I and the program I recommended).

But each lead you bring into the site, can become someone who funds your income consistently and one way to get them to sign up is this:

Offer freebies. 

Here is just a small sample of free things you can offer a perspective client, before officially selling them SEO services:

Site audits. These are HUGE. The very client I got above, as did Eddy did so by offering a free service to check out the perspective client’s site and seeing where it could do better, to get better results on Google. The very process of doing this shows the potential lead that you know your stuff and can help them grow, making the thought of investing in your services a much easier decision!

A free consultation. These are also huge as you can TALK to the perspective client 1 on 1 and literally explain how you can help their site grow. Mention the same case studies of your successful site and any local clients you’ve had before which are now happy. This absolutely makes selling EASIER.

There’s other ideas I can use, but these 2 are powerful and easy to close leads with.

What about the actual services. What do I charge?

This depends on how much work you are ready to do. Consider things like website creation, hosting, content creation services, SEO management and reports for the client and even doing things like having them pay you monthly to run ads to their site. Just charge them more than you pay for the ads, so you can keep the difference (a service fee if you will).

The prices for these common things can range into the $10,000+ range, depending on the site, the work involved and so.

For a good example, I have a friend named Dom who offers these types of services for individuals (not businesses) and you can see the kinds of services he offers and for how much here.

Part V: Starting your own SEO agency.

This type of opportunity arises when you have too many clients that you CANNOT manage on your own and require outsourcing work. I would say 1 client is enough to make you work part time, but 2 or 3 will take up most of your day’s work, which is why if you grow beyond that amount of people, you NEED HELP.

In these cases, you will have to figure out which of your services you can let other people do for you, and pay them for. This can eventually help your business become an agency.

One of the BEST case studies on how this is properly done is via a good friend of mine named Jay Niell who pretty much has successfully completed all 5 parts of this tutorial (this tutorial was made after his success, it’s not like he copied it). He runs an agency site here which you can check out for reference, but he basically does all of the things I’ve noted in this 5 part tutorial:

Coaching, consultations, and so on and he does it very well.

And this 5 part tutorial is how you sell SEO services.

It may be surprising for you to know how little actual advertising you actually need to do to make this work, but in the experiences I have had doing this, as well as the other people I’ve cited, this is actually how it’s done, with high success rates and when I said 100%, I was NOT kidding.

Knowing how to self SEO your website won’t just help you see more traffic, but it’ll also save you a lot of money from hiring people or agencies to do that.

The truth is that this process is simple to understand, but takes work to do and time to see results from (and this is just normal for SEO). But through the practice of repeating the steps I will be giving you, that process will become easier to understand and will take you less and less time to do, especially once you start seeing results from it.

The steps I’ll be giving you come from real experts.

And one of those experts is myself (who I am). And as for the other experts I follow, talk to and learn from, we all follow these very same steps to make our pages rank better and get more traffic. So the following guide isn’t a subjective approach to ranking on Google or Bing that’s made by one dude, it’s actually one that is used by true experts.

And the steps can be applied to a brand new page or an existing one. There are 3 main parts:

Now if you have a brand new page, you will start at part 1. 

If you have an existing page, you may probably skip part 1 and head over to part 2 or even 3.

And if you are worried or confused at which part to start at, either keep it safe and begin at part 1 or comment below and I’ll help you figure out which part to start on. But just make sure to first read the details of each part before asking.

Here is the 3 part breakdown of how to do SEO on your website:

Now before I move onto part 2, let me say that if you have a new, blank page, obviously make sure that your niche choice is properly picked out and again, ask me about this below if you’re confused.

If you are at a point where you already do have a page and it has content, if it doesn’t have a niche topic, my advice would be to either start a new one OR to adjust your current one so it does target a niche.

So for example, if you have a page which blogs about general health advice, I would select a specific health niche like anti aging techniques and continue growing your blog through that topic only. Notice, how I adjusted relevantly from a general topic to a niche one that is related.

Part II: Install these following, free tools (they help a lot):

The first is the All in One SEO tool which is one of the most important, preliminary tools you should have on your page when it’s brand new.

When you install it (You will need a WordPress site in order to do), and open it up, there will be a lot of blank areas that you can fill in, but the most important areas are the “Home Title”, the “Home Description” and adding your Google analytics code into the area of the All in One SEO plugin so you can track your rankings. The rest can be blank.

So whatever niche you chose, let the home title be the area where you give your page a name that relates to the niche.

For example, my page discusses and helps people with ranking better so my home title is something along the lines of “Helping people reach success with better Google rankings”.

For the home description, I only write a few sentences about how my page will help people with rankings.

The second is Google Webmaster Tools which helps track rankings, expedites indexing (getting shown on Google) and more.

These 2 tools are the essentials in my opinion for helping you self SEO your site and yes there are more tools I would recommend, but again, but these 2 are most important for blank pages and even those which are not new. These 2 tools will help you have a better “relationship” with Google and that itself is already a positive ranking benefit.

Part III: The longest part which is blogging over and over about your niche.

If we were to break down each part of this guide, then…

• Part I would be planning.
• Part II would be setting up some important foundations (tools).
• Part III would be where all the building and hard work would take place to make the website rank better and get traffic.

If you already have a page that isn’t ranking well, odds are, you should start here and optimize your page/s so that it can rank better. But if you have a new, blank page, you can already save time by just following the tips I’ll be giving here.

Now I did say that you should use my website to see an example of how this is done and I would recommend you browse through the different pages I have, that all talk about a branch of the niche subject I chose (SEO).

What I just explained is the core way to go about part III of this guide, but for specifics, here are the instructions on maximizing each blog post you write so that it ranks as best as possible. That blog post is excellent for new, blank pages.

But if you don’t have a blank page and want to optimize an existing page and improve the rankings of that, follow this guide.

An example of all 3 parts done properly (and the results):

And this can be done, by yourself.

Like I have said, this is what I personally do on my pages and the same experts who I speak to, also follow these same 3 parts. If you are new, this can obviously appear tough and in some cases, especially part III, it can certainly be the case, but with practice, this is something you can do as well.

Need more help with self SEO’ing your website?

Here’s a little preview of how the free training looks:

Whether you follow the parts I have explained or the recommended training on this subject that’s best for beginners, either one will help you properly self SEO your site and get better rankings from it.

Browseo is one of the many SEO tools available, that can help you identify certain things on your site or any site to better understand how Google sees it.

Recently, I had been looking through a list of SEO tools and this one came up. Being that was free to use, I decided to personally test it out and it didn’t really take long for me to realize that it’s not very helpful.

Much of the information it provides is quite obvious or useless for someone like myself, and is available in other, more important options that I will provide you (which are also free, just better). But since this is a pretty popular program, let me go over it and explain it’s benefits, while also explaining why those benefits aren’t that big of a deal either.

How does Browseo work?

You enter your URL (or any other) and it will basically give you a report on how search engine spiders crawl and view it (info available here). That is pretty much all there is to it, but while this sounds like a useful service, the truth is, things like Webmaster Tools would tell you the same thing.

Plus I felt the overall report I got from Browseo was pretty basic. 

I ran a few sites through it and overall, the reports it gave me didn’t really help me to understand the page I was looking at better, even if it was mine. Here is an example of me running a test on this service (using this site):

In this report, all that is really given to me that is of use is the “text information” area where I can see how many internal, external and nofollow links there are. If you are unfamiliar with these 3 things, don’t worry…

• You can get plenty of info on internal and external links here.
• Regarding nofollow links, here is info.

Now this kind of information is “slightly” useful because normally, if I wanted to see this information for my site, I’d have to log into a specific tool from Google to see that. But in this case, someone who is analyzing my site could use this service to see that info, and I could do the same to theirs.

And I don’t really care much about this information being public, because it doesn’t hinder my rankings or give away some important information that could be used by a competitor, but one can better analyze a site this way, just not by much…

Other than that info, all this service does is it analyzes my home page and tells me other data the search engine spiders would look at. 

Overall, I wouldn’t bother with Browseo (and what I would do):

The reason I wrote this article is because there are so many tools for this subject available and in truth, most of them are unnecessary for a website owner to use.

Very often, these services aren’t up to date with things like this:

• How rankings really work.
• They often provide information on useless things/terms that people who don’t know better, may waste time focusing on.

I see a little bit of that with Browseo, but I don’t think badly of it. I just don’t find it useful at all to me.

Let’s face it, the purpose of all these types of programs is to use their information or have them help you make good decisions on optimizing your site to rank better and get more organic traffic right?

Well let me advise you to follow this goal a different way, and here is how I do it:

For better rankings, here is what I focus on first:

I make sure to optimize my content according to these tips. I can assure you that focusing and applying JUST the guidance in that article will already put you above 99% of other competing websites and help it rank better and I have used the checklist in that article over and over and have seen many high rankings thanks to it.

It universally works for just about any site that tries to get high rankings for important keywords. So just follow that.

As for the tools, here is what I mainly use:

For my WordPress site, there are 5. Here is the list and why they are beneficial for better rankings. They are also free.

Now there are also additional ones that I use outside of my website to basically help me check things like the ranking reports on how the site is doing, what keywords it’s appearing for, loading times and which positions they occupy on Google and other important search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

And finally, I also use a separate one for helping me rank better on Bing. Here it is.

Now it may seem strange that someone who just spoke about there being too many options and most of them being unnecessary to start mentioning all these options, but let me assure you that many of them are one time set ups and/or so easy and quick to use that you don’t need to do anything major or monitor several different things. Just check out those articles and you will see that yourself.

Plus, they are also the most relevant options today with regards to better rankings because many of them are designed by the very search engines we are all seeking to get higher rankings on in the first place.

For example: Google and Bing’s Webmaster program. 

These options will give you the best information on how your site is doing with regards to those search engines so there’s no need for you to look at other options like Browseo or even other, more advanced options. These free ones will suffice.

Now since I circled back to Browseo, let me finish by saying that again, I didn’t find much use for this service and probably won’t use it again. I can also predict that this will be the case for many future SEO tools I’ll probably end up reviewing on this site, and again, the thesis for why that is has already been explained (Too many options, and too much unnecessary info).

I personally know how panicky one can get when they see that their Google rankings have dropped, especially dramatically. 

Having experienced this countless times, I have learned why this happens and what to do when it does. This article is going to show you what actions you can take to fix this problem. 

This is also an open topic meaning that if you are personally seeing your site’s rankings drop in Google and you don’t know why this is happening, tell me about it below and give me details so I can help you figure this out, but before you do that, please read this article first, because chances are, the issue that’s causing this on your site will be addressed and if my tips help, comment below anyway 🙂

The first thing I want to say is that there are a multitude of reasons why this stuff happens, but I’m going to list 10 of the most likeliest reasons and give you the solutions to each problem. Odds are, if you address these 10 problems correctly, then the other reasons why your rankings fell will also be addressed automatically. Think about this as though you are fixing the “root” of the problem.

Each of these 10 reasons carries it’s own color:

• Green: It’s not really a problem and will be corrected on it’s own.
• Yellow: It could be a problem and you should do certain things to fix it.
• Red: It is a big problem and it needs to be corrected ASAP.

Having these 3 colors to rely on to understand why your ranking is dropping is important because people who don’t understand how this whole ranking and SEO game works will look at any drop that’s happening and equate it to a red level emergency (many times, it won’t be the case), so hold on panicking just yet…

10 common reasons why your Google rankings drop:

1) The Google Dance. Level: Green.

There is a 99% chance that if your rankings are dropping or fluctuating, that the main cause is due to the Google dance and not some truly serious circumstance. This is a completely normal process that Google uses on EVERY, SINGLE, WEBSITE that tries to get high rankings.

The more new your website is in it’s early age (under 6 months) and it’s content amount (not a lot of pages or blog posts), the more this dance will happen and it can go on for months, during which the position your site appears on, will never stay that way. It’ll “parkour” itself all over Google’s search results. 

During this early period, your site will experience the Google Sandbox and within that time period, will see the biggest ranking fluctuations. 

Solution:

Understand that the dance and sandbox are normal things every new website goes through. Very often, you will need to just let this play out. The best way to calm the dance and solidify higher, more consistent rankings that aren’t hopping around everywhere is to add more content to your site and have it grow. 

The older a site is, the more content it has, the more authority there is, the less of a dance you’ll be experiencing. So work on the site and let the dance play itself out. To speed this along, each time you post new content, use Google Webmaster Tools and the fetch tool. It’ll provide faster indexing and help the site mature faster.

For example, I see this dance happening on one of my websites. I have a special tool which shows me how a particular blog post of mine is doing on Google. Check out those fluctuations:

But it’s because I know about the dance and that it’s normal, that I know it’s nothing to worry about. 

2) You are looking at your results through Google+. Level: Green.

I face palm a lot when I see people posting that they wrote a blog post and that it’s ranking on the first page Google in minutes. Already I know that there’s a 99% chance that they are not looking at the REAL results, they are looking at them while looking through their Google+ account.

You see what happens is that a person registers on this social network. 

Then they write a blog post and share that blog post on the network.

Then they go on Google, type in the keyword associated with that blog post and BECAUSE they are logged into the social network, they will get personalized results (not the real ranking results) and it will show that blog post they shared as being on the first page.

They are going to celebrate, thinking that they conquered the Google rankings, when in fact the TRUE position of that blog post is nowhere near page 1.

Once they find this out, they think it dropped somehow and panic. It kills me to have to tell them this each time because they get depressed and think they have somehow failed, but it’s necessary that they realize why this is going on, otherwise, they aren’t going to do what’s right to fix the problem.

Solution:

Do not be logged into the social network when you look for your blog post’s ranking. You can also just use a completely different web browser that you’re not logged into to see the results. 99.9% of the time, if you just published your blog post, it will NOT be on the first page. 

Don’t worry, use the same tip I provided above for the Google dance to fix this issue. It takes time, but it’s the best way to go improve the ranking.

Want to know what your site’s rankings are on Google? Use these tools.

3) You slowed down your blogging/content creation. Level: Yellow.

SEO and high rankings is something that takes a lot of work and time to reach, but there is also a maintenance discipline required to keep those rankings… 

Solution:

Most of the time, a SLOW decline in rankings is an indication that you’re slowing down on the content production. When Google sees that you significantly reduced your content production pace, they will adjust your site’s favorably with it, accordingly. It may not always happen quickly, but if you see steady decline in rankings, look to the pace you’re putting out content as a possible reason this is happening.

If you were once producing a blog post daily for an entire year, then the next year, you start producing a blog post once a week, that’s a significant decline in your content production and your rankings will proportionally reflect that, you’ll see it.

And also make sure you know the difference between a slow decline and a massive drop because each one has it’s own reasons. Slow declines are usually not as much of a big deal. If you see a MASSIVE drop, then you’ll need to start worrying (we’ll get to that situation). See this post to know how often you should post content.

4) Holidays or other events are playing a role. Level: Green.

If you are doing everything you need to do be doing for good SEO results, but there comes a moment where you suddenly start seeing a drop in traffic, odds are, it has nothing to do with you, either it’s the dance I talked about earlier OR some sort of national or worldwide event took place that distracted people from your site. 

Just about every single website created out there has it’s own “seasonal period” where it’s doing well and periods where this drops. 

Consider holidays for example: 

Christmas, New Years, Rosh Hashana, the Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, long weekends due to holidays, ect…

These types of events absolutely affect your traffic. They will likely even affect your sales and the reason why is because people are just distracted by the said event.

Consider world events too in this. Things happen all across the world that divert people’s attention to it and when those things happen, that attention is diverted away from your site, it’s NORMAL.

1 good example:

A client who I did SEO services for a very long time ago once called when he saw a drop in his site’s traffic and that clients were coming in less during a specific week. I diagnosed the problem as being that this week was Spring Break and thus that was the reason. Once it ended, traffic picked back up and clients began to flow back in.

1 more good example:

Solution: 

Don’t panic, once the said event passes, they’ll come back to you. All you really need to do is identify IF there’s an actual event happening that is impacting your traffic. Once you do that, look at your site’s rankings, if they are steady and/or not really rising or falling dramatically, then you are fine.

5) Your website has been hacked and has malware. Level: Red.

One of the fastest ways you will experience a rank drop in Google is if your website become infected with Malware. This can happen to just about anyone who doesn’t update their website or have a good security fence on it.

What’ll happen is that hackers will look for any “holes” in your website and basically use that to infiltrate it and start linking madly to low quality websites that also have malware. They’ll also infect people who visit your site with this should they click on the links.

Since this type of thing ruins the user experience and jeopardizes their computer/financial safety, Google will slap down your site very quickly to avoid that page getting too much exposure and damaging the user experience.

Solution:

The first thing you need to do is determine if your website is actually hacked. You can do this by running several different plugins for malware checks on your website and/or visiting it and clicking on the links you have, if they lead to some bad website (you’ll know it’s a bad site, trust me), then you’ve got malware.

Contact your hosting provider and let them know ASAP. They will basically reboot your site’s version to help clean it away from the issue but you will want to run a program to cleanse the page off the problem.

Then once you do, re-submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This will basically let them know your site is now clean and ready to get back up in the rankings.

I have personally had this happen on an old site of mine and I was able to re-establish rankings afterwards following these steps.

6) Your website has 404 errors (broken links). Level: Yellow.

When people visit your website and click on a link, they expect that link to open up. If it doesn’t, it ruins their experience and that does affect your site negatively.

Think of any link I posted on this very article. If you click it, it opens up. More so, you click that link expecting to see something and that expectation is rewarded. If it wasn’t, your experience on my site would be lowered and that would impact the SEO of it.

When Google crawls your website and checks your links, sees they are broken, that too affects your website negatively. 

You can also create 404 errors without even realizing it. The most common thing I see people screw up is that they’ll change their permalink. One word, one letter change is all it takes for that 404 to pop up.

Example:

Solution:

The first way to fix this problem is to never change the links you have on your site. But if you already did…

7) Your website links to low quality/bad content. Level: Red.

Very often people just don’t understand that the links they point their audience to, have an affect on that audience experience. If you link people to bad sites or sites that don’t interest them, they will leave your site. What’s worse is that IF you for some really stupid reason decide to link out of your website and into horrible, illegal, adult websites, your website will not rank well at all.

Solution:

Don’t link to bad sites. 

8) You have badly written content. Level: Red.

I honestly didn’t want to add this to the list because people who have bad content don’t even experience good rankings to begin with, but many times you just don’t know whether you write good or bad stuff.

Let me put it this way: Bad content = trying to spam people, write grammatically incoherent stuff, and trying to sell things without giving good reasons why people should buy them.

Solution:

Don’t write bad content…

9) You approve spam comments with bad links in them. Level: Red.

Spammers like hackers are always looking to infiltrate your website. And commenting with the intent to get their stuff through is one of the ways they do it. 

It just so happens that comments, when legit are GREAT for improving your SEO ranking, but when they are not legit, they can be horrible for the site.

Solution: 

10) You do the following black hat things. Level: Red.

Think of everything Google wants to see on your website to make it rank well and consider black hat to be the opposite of ALL of that. Here’s 3 types of black hat things you should avoid:

Solution:

Don’t use any of those 3 things I just listed. They are black hat.

Now that you know the 10 most common things that affect Google ranking…

As well as the reasons WHY they affect it, you should be able to isolate your personal issue and why your website is dropping there. You will also be able to identify if the reason is a big deal or something not to worry about.

Just as well, if these 10 things didn’t help solve the problem, you are welcome to tell me about your website and I’ll try to identify why there’s a drop happening. But please be specific about your website and what you’ve been doing on it/with it.

The LAST thing I want to say is that you should totally expect your rankings to rise and fall, even when your website is doing well. It can be a little and if that’s the case, you’re probably fine, if it’s A LOT, then you need to worry. 

But either way, EXPECT this to happen. This is a NORMAL part of SEO.

Want specific tips on improving your rankings?

If so, then I have a list of things you can do for that. Here is a great article that provides a checklist of things you should be doing.

Did you know that Google itself offers website owners free SEO tools to help their sites rank better? It’s true and I’ll show you 5 of the best ones.

I personally use these same 5 on all my sites and while there are a bunch of other ones available from both Google itself and other services out there (here’s some examples), we’re going to keep it simple and make sure the ones on this list stick to the following checklist:

• They need to be free.
• They need to be provided by Google officially.
• They need to actually help with SEO.

And with that checklist…

Here is the list of 5 SEO tools (free) from Google:

Now before I breakdown each one and explain how they help, I know there will be some of you who understand this topic and know about other options, that will wonder why I’m not including them (The Keyword Planner is one example). Here is why:

• I’m a minimalist when it comes to SEO tools and the following 5 I picked are essential in my experience.
• Second, some of the other options available, aren’t really that good (the keyword planner is bad).
• With the other options, also from Google, I feel like there’s other companies that provide better options.

Details on each one (And why they help with rankings):

I’ve got some additional good news about this list before I give you the explanations and that is some of these options need only be used once, but that one time you install or use them plays a vital role in SEO, and all of will be explained. Let’s get started.

1) Webmaster Tools (AKA Search Console).

One of the first things I do when I start a new website is that I head over to Webmaster Tools and verify that site with them. This service is incredibly important for many reasons:

• It helps Google see and understand your site more intimately.
• It helps you see exact keywords that your page ranks for on Google (see 4 other options too).
• It helps you see how much traffic your pages get from those keywords that are ranking.
• It offers you services such as warnings and updates on how your site is doing organically.
• It allows you to manually get Google to crawl your page faster (the second option on this list).
• Just having the search console connected with your site already offers your site more trust from them.
• Having it also provides you with a lot of amazing information and progress reports on organic rankings.

2) Fetch. 

This feature is a special part of the search console that deserves it’s own mention on this list and the reason why is that it actually improves the speed of ranking by letting you manually tell Google to crawl your page when it’s published (or updated and it needs to be analyzed more quickly for ranking).

I have explained here why using fetch helps cut down on ranking time and the main point is that for most people with new websites, crawling happens very slowly and when you implement the fetch tool, you can cut down on what takes days and weeks from Google to do, to about a few hours. 

One thing to note is that your page, when new will be stuck in a specific “trust stage” known as the sandbox which can last up to 6 months. But never the less, even when it’s in it, make sure to always fetch new content you publish to save on the crawling time, it may actually cut down on that 6 month time when you post more content and fetch it every single time.

When the site gets out of the sandbox (you will know because your organic traffic will basically start going up and you will see that through the search console), then you will start seeing Google crawl your site faster, but never the less, I would still advice using the fetch method. I have a number of authority sites and to this day, I still use the fetch option when new content is published. 

3) Analytics.

This is one of the options on the list which indirectly will help improve your organic rankings. The analytics program is also free, and is set up by first getting an account with it, getting a code from it, and putting that code in the proper place in your website.

If you have plugins like the All in One SEO, it makes putting in that code very simple.

But regardless, what this program does is that it carefully analyzes people who visit your website and how they interact on it (time on pages, which pages they visit, and so much more). The data you get from all of this will help you make more intelligent SEO decisions.

For example, if I see that a certain page I wish to see rank higher organically is:

• Not getting a lot of people to it.
• Or the people aren’t staying on it for longer.

Then I can use that data and do the following things:

• I can interlink other pages on my site to the specific page I want to see more traffic on.
• I can improve the content on the page to make it more attractive (quality improvements), causing the users to stay on it more.

Both of these changes would have positive effects on the page’s SEO and ranking and it would be thanks to the analytics program that I’d be able to see the faults and make the changes.

And on the note of changes and improvements to pages, I have a 15 point guide on this, where if you follow these points, you can basically optimize any page on your site to help it rank as best as it can organically, on every search engine (Bing for example).

4) Running a mobile friendly test.

There are many website platforms, all of which have their own list and choices of templates. But many of them aren’t updated and certainly not mobile friendly, which is an important piece of SEO.

Most sites these days will get close to or even more than 50% of all their organic traffic from mobile devices and if your site’s template is not optimized to show effectively on mobile devices, it can actually cause Google to lower the ranking of that page on the mobile devices. 

This is why Google released a free site known as the mobile friendly test, where all you need to do is visit the site, plug in the site’s URL, hit “test” and see if it comes up green or not. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to change it and that is actually simple. Here’s is how mine looks when using this test (and how yours should look too):

Should you find yourself in a spot where your page is not mobile friendly, simple do the following things:

-If you don’t already have it, use the WordPress platform, as it is considered the best for SEO and most sites that place high on Google carry this. 

-And second, WordPress carries 1,000’s of templates, and most of them are already mobile friendly. If you install a template which isn’t, simply change it to one that is by running it through the mobile friendly test.

The great news is that this service needs to only be used once (unless you decide to change to another theme and don’t know if it’s mobile friendly or not).

5) Site speed test.

This tool is important as it helps test the speed at which your website loads. Faster loading means better organic positioning, shortly put.

Test your site’s speed here. If you find that it’s slow and in need of speed improvements, consider improving your site’s hosting plan. Here is how mine currently looks:

An 86 score isn’t bad at all, but it could be better. You should note that site speeds fluctuate also. Sometimes your hosting could be going through a change or lag, during which time, the speed your page loads may be decreased. But if you have a decent hosting account, this is usually not going to be an issue.

But do note that hosting does impact SEO (here is why).

This is also a tool you can use again and again freely to make sure your site is optimized and running quickly.

Have options of your own you’d like to share?

While I personally use these 5 tools on my sites, there are others I also have, which are not made by Google, which is why I did not include them on this list. But if you have your own single or list of tools you use for your sites that you know helps with rankings, do share them below!