#011 How Long Should You Wait To Escalate An SEO Issue? 🤔

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Pinky Up Thursday — How Long Should You Wait To Escalate An SEO Issue?

How long should you wait to escalate an issue to your friendly-neighborhood SEO? Here are some general rules to know whether or not it’s time to panic.

Within 1-3 days of a traffic decline or low sales days. 

There may or may not be an issue here. If you’re getting concerned, you might want to send an email or DM to ask about it. But for just a few days? Probably not an issue.

5-7 days of silence or poor sales. 

You probably have an issue — best to have someone take a look. At this point, you might have made an update to your website or Google might be making some changes that can impact visibility. But usually with this many days gone by, something’s wrong.

Several weeks to 1 month with little to no traffic. 

You definitely have an issue and you need to get in touch. This could mean you have a big issue. Especially if your sales AND traffic have gone dry when you normally have at least something going on? It’s past time to get on my schedule.

Why bring this up? Often, I get inquiries about traffic going dry after a full month. In my opinion, that’s way too late. We want to make sure if you’re seeing traffic drops, that you have a plan in place to get it back, or at least an understanding of what might be causing the issue.

Here are a few factors that can impact your SEO visibility and create a sudden drop in traffic.

Redesign or Rebuild 

This is where I see the most traffic drops and declines. The mistake I see many, many, many business owners make is not involving an SEO professional in the redesign or rebuild process. In the design process, pages get cut, designs get shifted, copy gets changed, files get moved, URL structure shifts, technical submissions are missed. All recipes for a drop in valuable traffic. I’ve just launched my Power Hours in case you ever need advisement — whether making an update for yourself or a client.

Google Updates and Feature Changes 

Google is constantly updating their algorithms and search features. It’s very common to see shifts in your website traffic when these changes are taking place. Sometimes there’s a chance to save your traffic or make up for it in some way, and sometimes there’s not. For example, if Google decides to add new features to a search result, it could potentially push down the previously reigning results. Like with SGE (Google’s AI search features), Google will add new features from time to time, and suddenly your result is at the bottom. When that happens, we need to find out if we need to make page updates or find a new strategy to make up for the lost traffic.

Content Pruning or Updating Content 

Sometimes you want to update your content, but you over-prune it by accident. What happens is you think “Oh, this article doesn’t do much for us, I’m just going to unpublish this.” Then you unpublish that post, and another post, and another post. Suddenly, you’ve lost 10% of your content. And even if it wasn’t the biggest traffic-driving content, it still helped Google understand your website. Now, with that gone (along with valuable links), you can sometimes see a steep traffic drop. Sometimes you recover, sometimes you don’t.

There are even more reasons your website could potentially lose traffic — removing images, changing too much copy, adding heavy plug-ins that slow down your site, accidentally marking your pages no-index, and a wide variety of other factors.

The moral of the story is: have a friendly neighborhood SEO on hand (me, if you’d like). Especially if you value your traffic. (This is absolutely based on the many dozens of clients I have helped navigate their way out of an SEO traffic declining mess… So eat your veggies and don’t forget to have me on speed dial).

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Hasta la pasta, Crystal Ortiz

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