You have built your SEO friendly site and launched in January. The following months, February and March were great, mid-April your SEO rankings started to deteriorate. You look around and find nothing within your tracking data that says you deserve lower rankings. You might even call, or e-mail the search engine support staff to ask why your rankings have deteriorated. They don’t say much because your competitors have done some things since your most recent SEO upgrades. In effect, they say “Hey man, your problem not ours.”

For those that don’t watch traffic stats on a regular basis, this ranking deterioration happens frequently for many sites particularly in industry segments with a lot of new developments and aggressive on-line marketers. SEO in these particular areas are most definitely a game of keeping balloons in the air. The deterioration is generally most pronounced with rifle type SEO, while shotgun SEO generally has fewer vulnerabilities thus the deterioration happens less abruptly.

Rifle type SEO is generally based on strategies that move a site up the ranks quickly using a limited number of components that are given high marks by the search algorithms such as a new site launches or significant content updates usually coordinated with other marketing methods that drive strong traffic to the target site. Shotgun SEO is a slower process involving either a more balanced step by step process to establish a presence that moves up more slowly but holds at a higher average rank over a longer period of time, or a broader set of strategies that coalesce further down the time line forming something akin to a life preserver bobbing at the waterline amid the waves.

When looking at the top 20 or so results for a particular keyword, those results should be viewed as competitors with various degrees of desire to get time at, or near, the top. Your SEO rank is the result of both your efforts and the efforts of your competitors. Recently, there was an article about a company that had held rank 1 in a major keyword for a couple of years, but recently lost the rank to a competitor. Just goes to show that no ship is unsinkable.

Losing rank and learning the lessons is part of the game in SEO, competitors will do their thing so you need to do yours. The real question is where to fight the battles, and the types of battles you want to fight. It’s a big SEO ocean out there with both developed and undeveloped potential.