I believe in maintaining a healthy work-life balance. When I manage to disconnect from work, I become a more effective SEO and a better person overall. This is why I think we should be cautious about labelling situations as “SEO emergencies.”

An SEO emergency is a scenario that requires immediate attention—something that demands you to drop everything and solve the issue right away. It’s like having to abandon your meal in the middle of dinner. However, these situations are not as frequent in the SEO field as many might assume.

For instance, it’s not an SEO emergency if the client relationship manager delays sending parts of a pitch deck, forcing you to work late into the night to finish the SEO section. Similarly, if the marketing director notices a slight drop in rankings for just two days and insists you spend all Saturday trying to resolve it, that doesn’t qualify as an emergency either.

 

Genuine emergencies

There will be moments in your career when you might think, “If I don’t address this now, it will be harder to fix later.” However, these instances are likely to be rare.

Having worked in SEO for over 15 years, I can count on one hand the times I’ve genuinely needed to drop everything and tackle an SEO issue immediately.

 

What qualifies as an ‘emergency’?
In our field, very few situations can’t wait until the morning. However, there are a few scenarios where immediate action is necessary. Delaying too long can lead to significant traffic and revenue losses, especially if more than 12 hours pass before addressing the issue (although your company’s tolerance may vary). In most cases, it’s about reassuring stakeholders that this isn’t an emergency and that you have a plan in place.

 

Examples of SEO emergencies

 

The development site leak
We’ve all experienced this. After spending time ensuring the new website is secure on a staging domain, someone accidentally updates the staging site’s robots.txt to match that of the production site. Suddenly, Googlebot can access it. This situation is an emergency because once the pages from the development site are indexed, it takes time to remove them. If you act quickly, you can prevent bots from crawling these pages at all. If there are links to your development site elsewhere on the web, it could be found quickly, making every minute count. Waiting until morning to fix the robots.txt could mean the difference between resolving a crisis or spending months managing indexing issues in Google Search Console. To avoid this happening again, consider adding a login screen to your development pages for added protection against bots.

 

The errant noindex tag
This seemingly minor line of code can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. It’s easy to mistakenly add a noindex tag to important pages. If this tag ends up on pages vital to your SEO strategy, it qualifies as an emergency. It’s crucial to notify relevant teams and get this fixed as soon as possible. I recommend setting up alerts through your preferred SEO tools to catch when a noindex tag is added to a page where it shouldn’t be. The sooner you catch and correct this issue, the better.

 

Site down
A site outage is a significant issue, affecting not just the SEO team. A 5XX server error means that both visitors and bots can’t access your website, which is a serious problem. If you’re part of a company with dedicated developers, you may not be the first to notice the site is down. Ideally, there should be alerts in place to notify when the server response code changes. However, this isn’t always the case, particularly in smaller organizations, so you might be the only one with an alert set up. This situation definitely qualifies as a “drop everything and resolve it” emergency. While you may not be able to fix the site yourself, informing those who can is essential. If search bots can’t access your site’s content, neither can human visitors. Depending on your business type, this could lead to considerable revenue loss. For example, an ecommerce site with a downed website loses money for every hour it remains offline.

 

Commonly mislabeled ‘SEO emergencies’ and what to do with them

There will be many instances where you feel a situation is an emergency, often because someone else has indicated it is. However, it’s usually best to take a step back and assess the issue before rushing to act.

 

Ranking Drops
Experiencing a significant drop in keyword rankings can feel urgent. You log into your tracking software to find a series of downward arrows indicating lost rankings, which can certainly be alarming. However, I would argue that this is not necessarily an emergency that requires an immediate response. Instead of reacting right away, I suggest you pause and let any initial panic subside.

Once you’ve calmed down, begin to methodically assess the situation. Start by narrowing down which keywords, pages, and themes have been affected. Are the drops occurring only on mobile, or are they consistent across different locations and languages? What does the search engine results page (SERP) look like in response? By taking a systematic approach to your investigation, you can develop a clearer plan of action.

It’s likely you’ll need to conduct a thorough investigation to understand the cause and scale of the ranking drop. This may involve collaborating with other teams, such as your developers, to identify if any recent changes have been made to the site. You might also need to look at competitors to see if they are experiencing similar issues. This level of analysis is unlikely to be completed effectively in the middle of the night, which reinforces that it is not an SEO emergency but rather a high-priority task that requires careful handling.

 

Traffic Drops
Similar to ranking drops, a sudden decline in organic traffic can be concerning, particularly if you’re not the one who noticed it first. Nobody wants to receive a call from their CEO questioning why Google Analytics shows alarming figures. You might want to quickly check for immediate issues, like whether the Google Analytics tracking code has been removed from your site. If it turns out to be a tracking problem, what feels like an emergency can be resolved with a quick ticket for your analytics team.

If the traffic drop is confirmed and not due to a tracking issue, you’ll need to approach the diagnosis methodically once again. Examine what has happened across other channels. Has your paid media team started bidding on terms that previously drove organic traffic? Are you experiencing seasonal fluctuations? Have rankings, search volumes, or click-through rates dropped?

This situation is not an emergency; instead, it requires monitoring over several days to determine if it’s a temporary blip, a seasonal decline, or the start of a longer-term drop. For instance, if your B2B business typically sees reduced traffic in December, there’s little reason to log onto your laptop on Christmas Day to investigate.

 

Algorithm Updates
When a Google algorithm update is announced, it often causes anxiety in the SEO community, as it feels like a lot is at stake. However, during the first few days of an algorithm rollout, there’s typically little you can do but wait. Although you may notice fluctuations in rankings and traffic, these updates can take weeks to complete.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the changes in your SERPs and stay informed about what other SEOs are experiencing. Once the update has fully rolled out, you’ll be in a much better position to analyze its effects and determine if any corrective action is necessary.

 

Manual Actions
Receiving an alert about a manual action in Google Search Console is never a pleasant experience. It can certainly feel like an emergency when you discover that your site has been penalised. As Google explains, most manual actions are a response to attempts to manipulate the search index, leading to pages or sites being ranked lower or removed from search results without any visible indication to users.

While the knowledge that Google views your site as having spammy elements is concerning, addressing the underlying issues is unlikely to be a quick fix. For many SEOs, the activity leading to the manual action may not be something they directly engaged in, making it time-consuming to resolve. After cleaning up the issues, you’ll still need to submit a reconsideration request. According to Google, “Most reconsideration reviews can take several days or weeks, although in some cases, such as link-related reconsideration requests, it may take longer than usual to review your request.” Even if you work tirelessly over the weekend to address this issue, the manual action is unlikely to be lifted quickly.

 

Know what is and isn’t an SEO emergency

When faced with a time-sensitive SEO issue, it’s understandable to feel the urgency to resolve it as quickly as possible. However, it’s essential to recognise that many problems can often wait a day or two before action is required. Rushing into a solution without careful consideration can lead to oversights and additional complications down the line.

Prioritising your SEO fixes is crucial to ensure that the most impactful issues are addressed first. Take the time to evaluate the situation thoroughly, identifying which problems pose the greatest risk to your site’s performance and user experience. This approach not only helps in managing your workload but also enhances the overall effectiveness of your efforts.

Moreover, developing resilience and confidence in your decision-making will enable you to educate stakeholders about the intricacies of SEO management. Clearly communicating what truly requires immediate attention versus what can be dealt with later will foster a better understanding of the SEO process within your team. By guiding stakeholders on the importance of thoughtful prioritisation, you can cultivate a more strategic approach to resolving issues and ultimately improve the long-term performance of your website.

 

 

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