A website that was doing well in Google’s algorithm for some time won’t be on top of the world forever as is. That means organic searches, which play a major role in total traffic that comes in, won’t be as effective. It’s important to keep in mind that the algorithm is constantly evolving. That means the ranking of content is constantly subject to change.

Knowing all that, the major question remains: How can a website return to Google’s good graces?

Waiting for things to go back to the way they were can take a very long time. Months can go by without results, which won’t be good for any company or organization at all. Luckily, there’s a great way to handle things proactively: consistently updating the website well.

Make Sure the Website Is Indexed as a Whole

Google has plenty of “spiders” that crawl all over the web to find new content by way of following hyperlinks. The bots go through every single link on web pages so that the servers receive new information. In some cases, some parts of the website don’t get indexed. A crawl block usually ends up causing this issue. The robots.txt.file is likely where the block will be found.

The remedy is easy:

Robot.txt file

Type yourdomain.com/robots.txt then look for one out of the two code snippets:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

OR

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Optimize the Website for Voice Search

According to statistics, 111.8 million people in the United States alone use Google’s voice search. That is a market that any organization or company would benefit greatly from being able to tap. Local businesses are found by voice search by up to 53 percent of consumers, BrightLocal finds. More notably, 46 percent of all voice searches made on a daily basis are dedicated to finding local businesses.

Take Note of These Tips:

  • Answer questions possible customers will ask
  • Include words that ask questions (‘how’, ‘when,’ ‘where’) and compare (‘best’, ‘top-rated’)
  • Make sure to have conversational keywords going to fit in with the natural language processing of Google

Trigger a Google Recrawl of Updated Content

This is easier than it sounds, because Google is open to requests for content to be recrawled. As soon as the necessary updates are done, it’s time to make the request.

Take These Steps:

  1. Ensure compliance to general guidelines
  2. Use URL inspection tool for the URL to be inspected
  3. Click on request indexing

The last step will immediately get a live test going on the URL and put it in a queue for indexing. This tool will pull up any issues on the page which should be addressed immediately. 

For cases when several URLs are involved for submission, a sitemap needs to be made. Crawling can take awhile (days or weeks), depending largely on how many URLs are submitted.

Conclusion

The algorithm of search engine giant Google switches up quite constantly. As a result, top-rating websites won’t always be on top if their content and settings aren’t updated. Be sure to optimize for voice search and that the website is indexed as a whole and trigger a recrawl.

Working with the best SEO company will help your website’s relationship with Google flourish again. Sign up with Local SEO Pro! Our clients will always have updated, consistent business information and data everywhere.