It’s a long way from the top when you’ve secured that sweet, sweet number-one position on the search engine results pages. You must be doing something right to get there; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So why do SERPs sometimes change so quickly when you’re following every rule and tried-and-true trick you can think of? Moz has an answer for us today as they cover how to combat SERP volatility.

With each method of combatting SERP volatility, there’s often an associated root cause. Let’s look at some of the reasons you may experience volatility.

Reason 1: Mixed search intent, SERP variety

We all do our best to meet users where they are on their journey, so knowing the intent of a user allows us to craft a more relevant message. Sometimes, a query may have multiple different intentions, and the search engine doesn’t know which is most accurate.

Solution: When the search engine can’t identify the intent, specify the intent with your own keywords within the content. Perhaps your content needed this clarification to begin with, but it could also be that the intent behind a user’s search today is vastly different that what it would have been 6 months ago.

Reason 2: High keyword difficulty

Some keywords are just more competitive than others, so fluctuations in rankings are easy to understand.

Solution: Assess how recently your keyword competitors have refreshed their content. This may just be a reminder that it’s time for you to revisit the content in question.

Reason 3: High market competition

Content is king and everyone is after the throne. A new competitor may enter the ring, or an existing competitor may refine their existing strategy and begin churning out tons of new content.

Solution: While you can only publish so much content, any waves of new content affecting the SERPs can be analyzed and help you determine what people want to see. When you see your competitor’s content performing well, they’ve made your job easier by identifying topics for your next piece of content.

The key is not to panic during the inevitable temporary SERP results fluctuations but to identify longer-term trends to combat. Read on to identify more causes and solutions to dropping SERP rankings.

When our phones and computers become cluttered with files and we run out of space completely, the cloud becomes our best friend. Not only because we have a new space to dump everything, but for ease of sharing and collaborating on content. However, it’s all too easy to create the same mess within the cloud.

TheDrive is a smart cloud storage solution that helps organize your files so you can easily find what you need. Once your files have been organized, TheDrive will index PDFs, DOCX files, and more to create a searchable knowledge base. You can directly ask questions that TheDrive’s AI can answer for you, and it will even assist you in creating new content based on your indexed files.

People are true creatures of habit. Of course, we have productive and healthy habits as well as those we can afford to kick. And some sit somewhere in between, neither helpful nor hurtful, and sometimes inexplicable.

Trevor Noah is trying to get to the bottom of normalized breakfast eating habits in this KFC commercial. Having noticed chicken disappearing from breakfast plates despite its once-prominent foothold, he’s drumming up his own conspiracy as a pro-chicken advocate.