I’m a strong proponent of a healthy work-life balance. When I have the capacity to switch off from work, I’m a more diligent SEO (and nicer human). That’s why I’m cautioning us to be careful about what we deem an “SEO emergency.”
An SEO emergency is a “stop everything, get on the laptop and solve this now!” event. It’s an “abandon your plate in the middle of dinner” situation. Those are not as common in the SEO world as you may think.
It’s not an SEO emergency because the client relationship manager was late sending you the parts of the pitch deck, and now you need to work through the night to complete the SEO section.
Or the marketing director notices that the rankings have dropped for two days and wants you to work all day Saturday to “fix it.”
Genuine emergencies
There will be times in your career when you think, “If I don’t look at this now, it will be much harder to recover from later.” Though, those times will likely be few and far between.
I’ve been working in SEO for more than 15 years, and I can count on one hand the times I’ve genuinely needed to stop everything and attend to an SEO situation.
What actually constitutes an ‘emergency’?
Very little can’t wait until the morning in our line of work. However, there are a few situations where time is of the essence.
Leaving it longer will make it much harder to recover from.
You will lose significant traffic and revenue if you wait more than 12 hours (your company’s tolerance for the timeline may vary).
Beyond that, it may be a case of reassuring the concerned party that this isn’t an emergency and that you already have a handle on what action needs to be taken and by when.
Examples of SEO emergencies
The development site leak
We’ve all seen it happen. You’ve spent ages making sure the new website is under wraps on a staging domain, with no way for Googlebot to find it. Then someone accidentally updates the staging site’s robots.txt with the production site’s robots.txt and suddenly the floodgates are open.
Now, I’d consider this an emergency because once the development site’s pages are in the index, it takes time to remove them. If you act quickly, you can prevent the bots from ever crawling them.
If your development site has links to it elsewhere on the web, it could be found quite quickly. In this instance, every minute counts. Waiting until the morning to have the correct robots.txt crawl blocks implemented could be the difference between a crisis averted or you spending the next few months monitoring indexing in Google Search Console.
While fixing this, consider adding a login screen to your development pages. It would be an additional layer of protection against bots if this happens again.
The errant noindex tag
One line of code that can have a monumental impact on your SEO efforts. It is so easy to add to the wrong page, too!
If the noindex tag has been added to pages of significant value to your SEO work, I’d consider this an SEO emergency. It would be in your best interests to alert the relevant teams and get this fixed ASAP.
I strongly recommend setting up alerts through your favorite SEO tools to identify when a noindex tag has been added to a page where it wasn’t before. The quicker you can catch and rectify an errant noindex tag, the better.
Dig deeper: 4 key SEO lessons to avoid site launch disasters
Site down
This is a huge concern, but not just for the SEO team. Essentially, a 5XX server code that means visitors and bots cannot access the website is a significant problem.
If you work for a company with dedicated developers, you will probably not be the first to notice that the entire website is “down.”
Ideally, alerts would be set up to catch this change in the server response code. However, this isn’t always the case, especially not for smaller organizations. As the SEO, you could be the only one with an alert set up for this.
This is definitely a “drop everything and sort it out” emergency. While you will not be the one who can fix the site, it will help your efforts enormously if you alert those who can.
Not only will search bots be unable to view your site’s content, but human visitors won’t be able to either.
Depending on the nature of your business, this could represent significant revenue loss. For example, an ecommerce business without a functioning website will be losing money by the hour.
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Commonly mislabeled ‘SEO emergencies’ and what to do with them
There will be many instances where you feel like an issue is an emergency. Often, because someone else has told you so!
Actually, though, it is much better to take some time to properly assess the situation before acting.
Ranking drops
This can feel very much like an emergency. You log into your keyword tracking software and are met with a sea of red downward-pointing arrows. Your keywords have dropped, and your heart follows suit.
When you experience significant rankings drops, either in the severity of the fall or the breadth of keywords affected, it can seem pretty critical.
However, I’d argue that this isn’t an emergency. Considering the earlier criteria, it isn’t a “drop everything and respond immediately” situation.
Instead, I’d recommend you pause.
Wait. Let the panic subside.
OK, now you can start to address the issue methodically.
You’ll want to narrow down the keywords, pages and themes affected. Are the keyword rankings dropping just on mobile? Only in one location or across multiple geographies and languages? What are the SERPs looking like in response?
Once you start investigating what’s happened with a cool head, you’ll be able to formulate a plan.