How to deal with SEO emergencies
I’m a strong proponent of a healthy work-life balance. When I have the capacity to switch off from work, I’m a more diligent SEO (and nicer human). That’s why I’m cautioning us to be careful about what we deem an “SEO emergency.”
An SEO emergency is a “stop everything, get on the laptop and solve this now!” event. It’s an “abandon your plate in the middle of dinner” situation. Those are not as common in the SEO world as you may think.
It’s not an SEO emergency because the client relationship manager was late sending you the parts of the pitch deck, and now you need to work through the night to complete the SEO section.
Or the marketing director notices that the rankings have dropped for two days and wants you to work all day Saturday to “fix it.”
Genuine emergencies
There will be times in your career when you think, “If I don’t look at this now, it will be much harder to recover from later.” Though, those times will likely be few and far between.
I’ve been working in SEO for more than 15 years, and I can count on one hand the times I’ve genuinely needed to stop everything and attend to an SEO situation.
What actually constitutes an ‘emergency’?
Very little can’t wait until the morning in our line of work. However, there are a few situations where time is of the essence.
- Leaving it longer will make it much harder to recover from.
- You will lose significant traffic and revenue if you wait more than 12 hours (your company’s tolerance for the timeline may vary).
Beyond that, it may be a case of reassuring the concerned party that this isn’t an emergency and that you already have a handle on what action needs to be taken and by when.
Examples of SEO emergencies
The development site leak
We’ve all seen it happen. You’ve spent ages making sure the new website is under wraps on a staging domain, with no way for Googlebot to find it. Then someone accidentally updates the staging site’s robots.txt with the production site’s robots.txt and suddenly the floodgates are open.
Now, I’d consider this an emergency because once the development site’s pages are in the index, it takes time to remove them. If you act quickly, you can prevent the bots from ever crawling them.
If your development site has links to it elsewhere on the web, it could be found quite quickly. In this instance, every minute counts. Waiting until the morning to have the correct robots.txt crawl blocks implemented could be the difference between a crisis averted or you spending the next few months monitoring indexing in Google Search Console.
While fixing this, consider adding a login screen to your development pages. It would be an additional layer of protection against bots if this happens again.
The errant noindex tag
One line of code that can have a monumental impact on your SEO efforts. It is so easy to add to the wrong page, too!
If the noindex tag has been added to pages of significant value to your SEO work, I’d consider this an SEO emergency. It would be in your best interests to alert the relevant teams and get this fixed ASAP.
I strongly recommend setting up alerts through your favorite SEO tools to identify when a noindex tag has been added to a page where it wasn’t before. The quicker you can catch and rectify an errant noindex tag, the better.
Dig deeper: 4 key SEO lessons to avoid site launch disasters
Site down
This is a huge concern, but not just for the SEO team. Essentially, a 5XX server code that means visitors and bots cannot access the website is a significant problem.
If you work for a company with dedicated developers, you will probably not be the first to notice that the entire website is “down.”
Ideally, alerts would be set up to catch this change in the server response code. However, this isn’t always the case, especially not for smaller organizations. As the SEO, you could be the only one with an alert set up for this.
This is definitely a “drop everything and sort it out” emergency. While you will not be the one who can fix the site, it will help your efforts enormously if you alert those who can.
Not only will search bots be unable to view your site’s content, but human visitors won’t be able to either.
Depending on the nature of your business, this could represent significant revenue loss. For example, an ecommerce business without a functioning website will be losing money by the hour.
Commonly mislabeled ‘SEO emergencies’ and what to do with them
There will be many instances where you feel like an issue is an emergency. Often, because someone else has told you so!
Actually, though, it is much better to take some time to properly assess the situation before acting.
Ranking drops
This can feel very much like an emergency. You log into your keyword tracking software and are met with a sea of red downward-pointing arrows. Your keywords have dropped, and your heart follows suit.
When you experience significant rankings drops, either in the severity of the fall or the breadth of keywords affected, it can seem pretty critical.
However, I’d argue that this isn’t an emergency. Considering the earlier criteria, it isn’t a “drop everything and respond immediately” situation.
Instead, I’d recommend you pause.
Wait. Let the panic subside.
OK, now you can start to address the issue methodically.
You’ll want to narrow down the keywords, pages and themes affected. Are the keyword rankings dropping just on mobile? Only in one location or across multiple geographies and languages? What are the SERPs looking like in response?
Once you start investigating what’s happened with a cool head, you’ll be able to formulate a plan.
Chances are, you are going to have to do a significant investigation to really drill down to the cause and severity of the rankings drop.
You may need to involve other teams, like your developers, to see if there have been changes on the site recently. You may need to look into competitors and see if they have been affected similarly.
None of this is going to happen successfully in the middle of the night, so it’s not an SEO emergency.
Instead, it’s a high-priority task that will take some time to complete.
Dig deeper: 16 reasons why your page isn’t ranking on Google
Traffic drops
Similarly to rankings drops, seeing your organic traffic take a nose-dive can be worrying, especially if you’re not the one who discovered it.
No one wants a call from their CEO asking why Google Analytics looks so terrifying.
You may want to quickly rule out some immediate causes. For example, you’ll be able to determine if it is actually a tracking issue like the GA code has been removed from your site. That could turn what feels like an emergency into a quick ticket for your analytics team.
However, if the traffic drop is definitely a drop and not a tracking issue, you’ll again need to be methodical in your diagnostics.
Look at what’s happened with other channels.
- Has your paid media team started bidding on terms that used to solely drive organic traffic?
- Are you experiencing a seasonal decline?
- Is it specifically the rankings, search volumes or click-through rate that have caused traffic to decrease?
This isn’t an emergency because you must monitor it over a few days to determine if it is a blip, seasonal decline or the beginning of a sustained decline.
For example, you may see significant traffic declines in December. There’s likely no reason to be logging onto your laptop on Christmas Day if you know that your B2B business sees very little traffic during the holiday week.
Dig deeper: 13 questions to diagnose and resolve declining organic traffic
Algorithm update
The SEO industry gets nervous when a Googe algorithm update is announced. It can feel like a lot is at stake. The pressure is high.
Realistically, the first few days after an algorithm update begins rolling out leave SEOs with little to do but wait.
We’ll see fluctuations in rankings and traffic, but these updates can take weeks to roll out fully.
In the meantime, keep monitoring the changes happening in your SERPs, read up on what other SEOs are noticing about theirs and wait to see how it all shakes out.
Once the update has finished, you’ll be in a much better position to analyze what’s happened and determine whether you need to remedy any losses.
Dig deeper: How to communicate Google core updates to executives
Manual action
No one wants to see this alert in Google Search Console. This might feel like an emergency when you discover that your site has been hit with a manual action.
As Google says:
“Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.”
Knowing that Google perceives your site to have spammy elements, and this could result in pages or the entire site being demoted in the SERPs, is highly concerning.
However, even if you know the “manipulative” activity that has led to this action, it will likely not be a quick fix.
For most SEOs, the activity isn’t something they have engaged in and, therefore, will take some time to unpick.
Once you have cleaned up the issues, you will still need to submit a reconsideration review request.
Google states in its Search Console Help Center:
“Most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks, although in some cases, such as link-related reconsideration requests, it may take longer than usual to review your request.”
Even if you work all weekend to fix this, the manual action will likely not be lifted soon.
Know what is and isn’t an SEO emergency
When faced with a time-sensitive SEO problem, you will want to get working on it as soon as possible. However, the issue can usually wait a day or two.
Learn to prioritize your SEO fixes so the most impactful ones get dealt with first.
Develop resilience and the confidence to educate stakeholders on what really needs to be addressed right now and what would be better dealt with after some consideration and time.