(That’s a famous quote of former UofL coach Lee Corso)

The other day I posted an entry touting the rankings we’ve maintained for our corporate site (smbconsultinginc.com) for terms such as “business consulting” and “marketing consulting.” Here’s where the “not so fast” comes in, and it shows the volatile nature of organic search rankings.

At the time of that posting, we indeed ranked #8 for “marketing consulting” in Google, but we’ve taken a “hit” since that posting to where we’ve gone down to 26th as of this posting. The site is holding strong in Yahoo at #6 for the same term, but I wanted to share this with you as a real life demonstration that organic search rankings are not guaranteed and are not the only marketing vehicle a business should be focused on to increase awareness and generate leads.

So what gives? I made some changes to the site on several pages after posting the rankings entry the other day, but I’m not convinced that’s the only thing that pushed us down, but it is a pretty good indicator if you make a change one day and your rankings slip two days later. Does that mean we should panic and undo the changes? No! That would defeat the purpose of our “test” (an attempt to improve conversions which is ongoing).

Will we see less traffic from that search phrase as a result? Indeed.

Am I particularly worried? Not a bit. These things tend to work their way out over time, and my guess is this will be a temporary slip because the site has been steadily climbing for months. Many clients call me as soon as their ranking hits a certain point then suddenly drops as if we had some kind of magical pull on Google or something to control their rankings. It happens, and often times it is a result of minor changes here and there that may seem insignificant at the time of the change, or perhaps one of the sites that links to us got dinged for something which impacted our site’s search ranking (most likely). More often than not, based on our experience, the rankings return after a little dip so it’s nothing to panic about.

I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t share the good with the bad even though this isn’t “bad” in the truest sense. As stated above, it happens and it’s not a cause for hysteria or knee jerk reactions.

Do you have any similar stories to share? If so, what did you do when your site’s rankings dipped? Did the rankings return? How long did it take?