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Loss Of SEO Visibility And How To Diagnose It With These 8 Tools

By Karol K23 Jul '15

“Wait … what just happened to my damn site, and why is it nowhere to be seen on the first page of Google?!”
… Sometimes diagnosing a loss of SEO visibility is rather straightforward, unfortunately.
In most cases, however, provided you’re not entirely out of luck, things are a bit more subtle.
I mean, even if you do lose some SEO visibility, it doesn’t happen across the board, but rather affects specific areas of your site, here and there, so to speak.
So how to keep your finger on the pulse? How to stay updated with what’s really going on with your site SEO-wise, and most importantly, what to do in case you discover any shenanigans?
Well, this is where the tools we’re listing today come into play. Come dig in.
Note: The original idea for the method that I’m just about to share comes from Asaad Dookhy – the SEO Lead at Decathlon UK – who was generous enough to share his strategy with us and let us describe it in this post.
What you’ll learn:

• How to diagnose a loss in SEO visibility,
• How to identify the areas of your site that got affected the most,
• How to notice any correlations between known Google algorithm updates and your visibility loss,
• How to evaluate if a loss of backlinks is to blame,
• How to assess if there was an industry-wide shakeup,
• Which of your competitors benefited the most and how,
• What to do to fix it.

1. Google Analytics (GA), for getting a good top-level view

http://www.google.com/analytics/
Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way. You were perfectly aware that GA is going to appear on this list somewhere.
1.1 Finding out if there’s anything to worry about
GA is simply invaluable when diagnosing any sort of SEO trouble. Quite naturally, if your site loses any of its SEO visibility, this is going to be reflected in your overall organic traffic stats. Examining those numbers gives you a general overview of the situation and its seriousness.

1.2 Identifying individual areas of the site that got hit
Next, in case anything is going on, go to the Site Content section. There, you’re going to identify the areas of your site that got hit the most. Remember, we’re just looking into the organic traffic, not the overall numbers.
Starting from your most popular content, make your way down the list (as far as you want to go) and single out the specific pages that lost the highest numbers compared to their general trends from a couple of weeks back when everything was fine.
Also, it’s a good idea to go back a couple of years to see if the drop isn’t a seasonal thing (often the case in some niches).

(Asaad actually advises using Searchmetrics for this part of the job, but considering that the most usable version of the tool is $2,000 a month, we’re having hard time including it in this list. Hence using GA instead.)
1.3 Checking what’s going on on mobile
One more thing we’re going to do with GA is check how the site is performing on mobile. With the mobile-friendly algorithm update now live, it’s possible that some of your visibility loss (or even all of it) comes from mobile.
This can be looked into by going to Audience > Mobile. There, select the checkbox next to mobile, and then plot the new row:

Is there anything shaky going on, or is the mobile graph just a scaled down version of the main sessions graph?

2. Google Search Console (GSC), for confirmation

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
(Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools)
GSC has a lot of great uses for a site owner and especially if you want to assess your SEO losses in certain areas.
2.1 Checking the site’s mobile-friendliness
First off, since we were just talking about mobile a minute ago, a good place to start is to check what GSC has to say about the mobile-friendliness of your site.
Just go here and input the URLs from your site that were the most likely to get hit. Those can be the URLs that you discovered earlier through GA (those that lost traffic) or, if you’re running your site on WordPress, example URLs representing different types of pages that you use (for instance: one blog post page, one category page, the homepage, etc.).

This will be enough in most cases as you can generally assume that if, say, one of your blog posts isn’t mobile-friendly then they probably all aren’t, and you just need to adjust that naughty single post template.
2.2 Any manual actions taken against your site?
GSC will also let you know about any manual actions that might have been taken against your site.
This can be viewed if you go to Search Traffic > Manual Actions. If everything is in order, you’ll see this:

If not:

(Screenshot courtesy of Search Engine Land. Sorry, I’m lucky enough to not have any such screenshots of my own, so I had to borrow one.)
2.3 Checking your search engine impressions
GSC also provides you with sometimes controversial impressions data. Basically, as Google puts it:

[Impressions represent] the number of times pages from your site appeared in search results.

In short, what this means is that any serious problem with your SEO visibility will be reflected in your impressions graph. You can see it by going to Search Traffic > Search Queries:

If there’s a significant drop, you’re in trouble.
2.4 Looking into your brand terms
One final check you can perform in GSC is looking into your brand terms and how they perform. In other words, what you’re checking here is whether the loss of SEO visibility could be caused by the brand itself losing popularity.
This you can do by going back to Search Traffic > Search Queries and filtering the list to show only search terms including your brand name. Again, pay attention to the trends and see if you’ve experienced any sudden drop in impressions.

3. SEMrush, for identifying the troublesome keywords

http://www.semrush.com/
Okay, so at this point you know that your site got hit and what areas received the most damage. Now let’s look at the other side of the equation – finding the keywords to blame.
3.1 Checking where you rank for specific keywords
Doing this in GA can be somewhat difficult as there’s a lot of guessing work involved. After all, Google is openly against any sort of keyword-based rank tracking.
Luckily, SEMrush still seems to function just alright. In it, go to Organic Research > Position Changes. This is where you can browse through a timeline revealing how you’ve been gaining or losing keyword rankings across a period of time.

There, click on the particular dates that seem to have more going on and discover the specific keywords that were hit the most.
Editor’s note: Asaad’s suggestion to use SEMrush for this step is pretty on point, but our Positions Explorer here at Ahrefs offers a very similar set of features. To see your site’s recent changes in organic keywords, just go to Positions Explorer, look up your site, and then go to Recent Changes (left sidebar). 


I encourage you to check out both tools (SEMrush and Positions Explorer) and then just use the one that fits you better. 
Final piece of advice. If the rankings are stable then you might want to check the overall search volume of your most important keywords. You may be dealing with a temporary glitch on the market itself. For example, if any new competing solutions or products have been released lately then their rising popularity may be the cause of your keywords dropping a bit.

4. Panguin Tool, for checking if you were hit by an algorithm update

http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/
This tool does a great job at showing any correlations between your search engine traffic and the known Google algorithm updates. All you have to do is go to the tool, log in with your GA account, and select any of your Analytics profiles.
This will present you with an overlay view of your organic traffic vs. Google algorithm updates. The great part here is that this works on any screen within GA, so you can look into the overall numbers, individual pieces of content, devices, and so on.

If you can see any correlations, look into a given Google update more closely and figure out what the problem is and what you can do to solve it.
We actually published some articles that can help you with that part:

• How to Identify and Recover from a Google Panda Penalty
• Google Panda 4.0: Initial Trends and Thoughts
• 7 Tips to Improving Your Local Presence Post Penguin in 2015
• How to Recover from a Google Penguin Penalty Using Ahrefs

5. Ahrefs, for discovering lost links

https://ahrefs.com/
For this part of the job, we’re going to use the Site Explorer.
While viewing your site’s numbers, right in the center of the screen, you can see a nice chart presenting your New & Lost Backlinks:

If anything looks odd, you can go to Links – New / Lost (left menu, under Inbound Links) to do further investigation.
Once there, select the troublesome week, and look into the links you lost during that time:

At this moment, rather than just focusing on the gains and losses one by one, go a step further and aggregate the data into a pie chart. This will show you what areas of your site lost the most links.

Next, see if the data correlates to what you’ve gathered so far – mainly your GA data.
As we all know, links are not created equally, and sometimes losing one good .edu link can cause a significant drop, while losing 100 comment links goes unnoticed (or might even give you a boost).
Some possible reasons why you might lose a link:

• Your partnership with the site has ended and you’ve forgotten about it.
• The links you’ve earned got pushed down due to new content being created on the site.
• The link was manually removed by the editor.
• Technical difficulties.

6. SimilarWeb, for monitoring your competition

http://www.similarweb.com/
Things going slow for you isn’t always something you can blame on algorithms, your links vanishing overnight, or the market in general. Sometimes, your competition is simply moving faster than you.
With SimilarWeb, you can check if that’s indeed the case. Go to the main tool and look up your own site vs. your top 3-5 competitors. You can adjust the date range to only display the period that you’ve identified earlier through GA as the moment when you started losing your traffic.

Again, see if there’s a correlation between you losing visibility and your competitors gaining some.
(Hint. At this point, you can also come back to Ahrefs and try identifying the links that your competitors gained while you were losing yours.)

7. Wayback Machine, for looking into your competitors’ content

https://archive.org/web/
If your competitors indeed experienced a gain, apart from checking their backlinks (can be done with Ahrefs Site Explorer), you should also look into the content they either published recently or the past content that they fixed/improved.
Going back to SEMrush, you can use the tool to identify your competitors’ top content in relation to the keywords they’re ranking for. Once you have that, first check the content manually, just to see what it looks like and assess the value it brings to the visitor. Next, go to the Wayback Machine and see what this content used to look like prior to it gaining more SEO visibility.

Oftentimes, you will find that your competitors work really hard on improving past content. Having this sort of knowledge is a great starting point to figuring out what you can do to improve your own content game.

8. Performing quick technical checks

Okay, I know this final entry does stick out a bit since it’s not a tool, but it’s still a very important part of the process. After all, you don’t want your efforts to all go to waste simply because you’ve overlooked a very basic issue with your site.
So, see into these and make sure there’s nothing fishy going on with your site from a technical point of view:

• Check your robots.txt file and make sure you’re not blocking any URLs or bots by accident.
• Check your .htaccess file for similar issues.
• Go back to GSC and see if the number of 404 pages on your site hasn’t increased. Also, check if there isn’t any drop in the number of your indexed pages overall.
• If you’re using hard redirects, make sure they’re code 301 – seen as permanent by the search engines.
• Check your canonical URLs. Are they pointing to the right place?
• Make sure you don’t have competing pages trying to rank for the same keyword. Rather join those pages into one, stronger page.

Any of the above problems can occur for a number of reasons. For instance, maybe you installed some new plugins, or a new theme, or tried a new CDN service, or, even worse, your site got hacked. This is why doing a technical check is always time well spent.

9. ?

That pretty much sums up the list of tools and the whole guide on what can be done if you experience any sort of SEO visibility/ranking problems. At this point you should know:

• what the areas of your site are that got affected the most,
• what the likely reasons are,
• whether or not your competitors played a role,
• how to fix the situation.

So what’s your take here? Did we miss any important steps?

Top SEO Interview Questions

1) What is SEO and introduce its types?
Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.
Two Types of SEO are:

1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization

2) What are the SEO tools do you use?
The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, keyword search, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.
3) What do you mean by Backlink?
 The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as Backlink.
4) What are out bound Links?
The outbound links are our website links to other webpage or website.
5) Can you tell me something about Googlebot?
To index a webpage Google uses the Googlebot software. Caching, Crawling and indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

6) What is Cross linking and what are the function of Cross linking?

1. Cross linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.
2. It provides the users with reference sites that consists the content related to the search.
3. It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods that have been built on the Internet.
4. It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search engine optimization techniques and methods.
5. The site ranking is calculated on the basis of the relevance of the sites and then it is reflected on the search engine.
6. It uses SEO tools that provide reciprocal links and inbound links that can be used as our SEO.

7) What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?
Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.
8) Can you mention the functions of body content relevance?
Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.
9) What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?
Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.
10) What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?
On doing search on your domain and if nothing appears then there are three possibilities.

1. May be the site is banned by search engines
2. May be no index by search engines
3. Some canonical issues

11)What is keyword stemming?
The process of finding out the root word from the search query is referred as keywords stemming.
12) Name some SEO blogs that you frequently read?

1. Jimboykins
2. Search Engine Land
3. SEOSmarty
4. MOZ
5. Search Engine Journal

13) What do you mean by Cloaking?
Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing search. In this technique a different content will be searched by the search engine than what is presented or searched by the users.
14) How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?
There are two types Meta tags in SEO.

1. Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits
2. Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits

15) How many characters limits in Title tag?
We can add 70 characters in title tag.
16) What is Google Sandbox?
Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.
17) Tell me something about Black Hat SEO?
In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.
18) Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?

1. Link Farming
2. Hidden text, etc.
3. Gateway or Doorway pages
4. Cloaking
5. Keyword Stuffing

19) Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?
Nofollow links are not passed by search engines bot and therefore cannot be cached or indexed. Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink and it passes through all search engines and it puts an impact over page rank.
20) What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.
SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.
21) Why the Title Tag in website is valuable?
Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what is there in the page.
22) What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?
Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although, building backlinks are useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.
23) Can you mention the difference between SEO and SEM?
SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through Search Engine Result Page (SERP) , while to optimize the search result of your webpage or website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used.
24) What do you know about LSI?
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc.
25) How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?
To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of traffic.  The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.
26) What is the meaning of competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.
27) What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?
My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step

1. Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the key words.
2. Also, I would look for relevant key-words that can be helpful.
3. Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles and description.
4. If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might comprises     serious issues and re-work might be required.

28) What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google.  It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.
29) What is 301 redirect?
It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url . It is a permanent redirect and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url .
30) What are Webmaster tools?
Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.
31) What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?
From SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.
32) What is robots.txt? 
Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.
33) What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain?
The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.
34) Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?
From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be    implemented.

1. Good Internal link structure
2. Generation of dynamic title and description
3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

35) What is the latest update in SEO?
The latest updates in SEO are:

1. Panda
2. Penguin

Bonus! 3 More!
36) What are the key aspects of Panda update?
Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.
37) What are the key aspects of Penguin update?
Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.
38) How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?
Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.