There are different reasons behind the decline of page rankings. To mention a few examples, algorithm updates, competitors overpowering your efforts, and keyword relevancy, can be the reasons behind the fall. Once businesses rank number one for most pages, it is more likely for business owners to forget about checking those pages from time to time as they dedicate most of their efforts to bringing the lower ranking pages into speed.

Due to this, most websites lose their power as the web owners neglect to maintain the most important pages, triggering a drop in their rankings, site visits, and conversions.

The question that site owners should be asking about is how to bring back the old landing pages into ranking? The regular SEO strategies should do the trick, but how much should you do without over doing it? Check out the 6 important things you should consider.

1. Keywords

Based on user experience and the demand for certain products, there is a big chance for the keywords to change over time. It is important to build a habit of checking keywords regularly  to make sure that all the keywords are current and relevant to your business. While cleaning up the keywords, it is recommended to remove all the black hat SEO tactics, especially keyword stuffing and re-optimize the site pages based on the most current key phrases.

2. Content

High quality content will always refresh the boring old content, and increase page visits. Having different types of content is a perfect solution to keeping the visitors on your site, and attracting visitors to come back for more. Apart from content creation for page fulfillment or page rewrites, it’s a great idea to invest in other forms of sharable content including videos, animations, and infographics. The sharable content will boost the site visibility and increase page shares.

3. XML Sitemap

Resubmitting the new content to the search engines will enable the search engines to properly crawl the edited pages and boost the rankings for those pages.

4. Social media

Promoting the improved pages will help them become more visible. For most cases, visual content is more sharable and has a higher chance of bringing back visitors to the site. Adding sharable content will attract back links to the targeted pages, and the website as a whole.

5. Links

Internal links: By directing other well ranking pages within the site, it will automatically form a nice flow to the reviewed pages. Having links from the homepage and other services pages, will direct the site visitors and search engines to the focused pages. As a result, it will add credibility to the pages and importance. External links: External links will build credibility to the specific pages and bring traffic to the targeted pages, as a result boosting the page and site rankings.

6. Optimize for conversions

Before optimizing, the first thing to do is to fix page elements that restrict conversions including: bad links, wrong phone numbers, and review the call to action for those pages. The website should already be optimized for conversion, therefore, by adding goals to the pages, including contact forms, clickable phone numbers and page view duration is the best way of measuring your efforts. Google Analytics’ bounce rate is one of my favorite tools, because it is a quick way of knowing how your pages are doing. Having these data results in hand will help any business come up with the best strategy for each page instead of investing in different things that may or may not work in the long run.

Remember that you don’t have to rank for everything. It is crucial to know what’s important to the website, and the business in general. Always focus on what really matters instead of trying to rank for every keyword in your industry. This is the time to rank for relevant pages and not accumulating keywords.

Please feel free to share your own tips and advice on how to bring back the old landing pages into ranking.

By: Naima