My Fall from the Internet Entrepreneur SERPs

If you followed my blog before my hiatus, you probably had a chance to read my series on Ranking in the SERPs and my personal battle to get to the top slot of the Google search results for the term ‘Internet Entrepreneur’. If you didn’t, well lucky you, I’ve included links at the bottom of this post. Sadly after my long absence from posting here, I’ve dropped a number of slots in the SERPs from 5th to now a lowly 21 out of the 1,170,000 results for Internet Entrepreneur.

What Impact Does This Have on Me?
Although not an extreme impact, I’ve noticed the drop in organic search results in my traffic stats. While I was ranking 5th for the term I found myself averaging around 90 unique visitors coming to the site from organic search results. Now that I rank 21st, I’ve received a terrible 3 unique visitors via the Internet Entrepreneur term.

SeoBook’s Keyword Suggestion tool estimates a monthly search volume of 2,342 for the term and by being 3rd page leftovers I’m getting less than 0.01% of the total organic traffic created by the term. Back when I was on the first page I was receiving just about 2% of the overall traffic. It’s obvious, even without this post that the higher you rank the more potential traffic you can receive.

Why Did I Fall So Far?
Well it’s hard to say exactly why I’ve fallen so much, but there are a few things that make sense. First, I stopped posting for over 1 month. It’s a pretty well known fact that search engines (especially Google) are big fans of fresh content that’s updated regularly and I wasn’t producing any. New content has a two-fold effect; it first gives the search engine spiders something to look at and will increase the number of times and amount of time they spend on your site. Secondly, the new content helps promote inbound linking (assuming people will link to your content). The more inbound links the better your overall ranking as well.

My second speculation as to why my blog has fallen so far in the SERPs is my new theme. I’m not completely positive the theme has anything to do with it, but it could be that this theme is not as SEO friendly as my previous theme. I know even before I launched my new theme that my blog was ranking pretty low for the Internet Entrepreneur term, but it may have gone down a bit further since the transition. A well coded XHTML valid theme can go a long way in making your content legible for search engines.

How Can I Fix This?
Luckily for me, SEO is a never-ending game of ups and downs. I know that I can get myself back on the first page of the SERPs and my ultimate goal is to get to the top slot. My first step towards fixing things is to keep producing quality content which should also promote inbound links. I also plan to take a good look at my theme to see if there are any changes that can be made to further enhance its readability to search engines. With these few changes (simples ones at that), I believe I’ll be well on my way towards making it back to the first page and reclaiming my slice of the organic pie.

In case you missed them, here are my previous articles on Ranking in the SERPs:

The SERPs Teeter Totter
Ranking in the SERPs - Part 1 - Keyword Selection
Ranking in the SERPs - Part 2 - Influential Factors
Ranking in the SERPs - Part 3 - Tips & Techniques

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