SEO Rankings Drop Guide

Search Engine Optimisation can help companies rank highly on a keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business., or even just their own name. Done right, the effects will be enjoyed in the long-term, as customers find and visit your site organically. It is the best strategy to improve organic reach, visibility, and even customer satisfaction.

It is, however, a lot of work, and the last thing many businesses and professionals want to worry about is their hard-earned SEO ranking dropping.

Google releases an estimated 500 algorithm updates every single year, and they will only inform the public about a shockingly few of them. With every update, changes are being made, and those changes can and will affect your ranking. Sometimes it will be for the better, but if it was for the worst, you need to assess the issue and update your SEO strategy.

Why Do SEO Rankings Drop?

Search Engine rankings drop for a variety of reasons. It could have been an algorithm update, it could have been a change that you made to your internal linking structure, it might have been due to a site linking to you being penalised, or it might actually not mean anything. SEO Rankings can temporarily drop because your tracker is picking up on an experiment or personalisation settings.

Most commonly, however, the reason why there was an SEO ranking drop will boil down to these three situations:

1.    Change to Your Site or Strategy

If you have updated your website recently and saw a drop in your rankings, then the issue could be on your website itself. As technical SEO and troubleshooting is a stressful and time-consuming task, however, it is an excellent idea to analyse first whether the issue is with Google’s algorithm, or with your backlink profile.

If you have verified these two causes are not the reason, then it is time to audit your website. Check first to ensure that the site speed, security, and linking structure are solid. A bad update for a plugin or the CMS system you use can dramatically alter the way your website works, and therefore your SE performance.

The update that caused the problem might be old as well, as it takes weeks and sometimes months for changes on your website to be noted by the algorithm.

2.    Change to Google Algorithm

There are a variety of ways that you can check if there has been a change to the algorithm.

3.    Your Site Lost LinksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.

A natural backlink profile is one of the most essential aspects of ranking, and you are not in charge of it. Even if you hire link building services, the lifespan of those links is limited. Posts might be deleted, your link might become corrupted, or the ranking of the site that hosts your link might drop significantly.

Such changes will need a backlink audit to diagnose, but thankfully an otherwise healthy backlink profile should be able to take the brunt of one site going down or dropping in page ranking.

Sometimes the Problem is a Short Term One

Though those are the main reasons why SEO rankings drop, it is important to remember sometimes a “drop” does not mean anything. It only matters if the drop is sustained over a period of time.

Your rank tracker could be acting up, Google changes the result page, and the trackers have not caught up, systems are down, and so on. Always check the rank tracker’s website or social media to see if there are any issues the developers are aware of or go to online sites where users can submit problems with the service.

How to Check if Your Ranking Has Dropped?

There are a few ways that you can check if your ranking has dropped, by how much, and if the drop is permanent.

1.    Are there a Sustained Rankings Drop?

Again, before you panic is a good idea to go through these steps:

1. Search the rank tracker’s website or social media for any issues with the system.
2. Check your Google Search Console and webmaster tools to verify if there is a drop in rankings.
3. Check the Google Algorithm Weather Report to see if any significant algorithm updates have recently occurred (high temperature indicates yes).

Alternatively, you can simply be patient. Check back every day for a week or two and make a note of the drop and if it recovers. One bad day is just a blip, but if the ranking drop is sustained, then there is likely an issue you need to rectify either yourself or through managed SEO services.

2.    If Organic TrafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. Has Dropped (and if so, to what pages)

Organic traffic can drop for a variety of reasons. You need to determine where that drop occurs, and if it affects the whole site or just a few specific pages.

For example, if you are missing organic traffic from your social sites, then the issue might not have anything to do with Google’s algorithm.

3.    If Google Search Console Shows a Rankings Drop

Your Google Search Console can provide some great insight into your page ranking and whether a drop has occurred. Use the Search Analytics to see the clicks, impressions, and what each keyword ranks and where it is located on a page.

Compare your rankings tracker with what you can see in the Google Search Console. If both are showing an issue, and that issue is lasting for days, then the drop is real, and you need to conduct a proper audit.

Determine the Depth of the Rankings Drop

Knowing your ranking is dropped is the first step. Before you can conduct damage control, it is a good idea to understand how much damage you are dealing with.

To determine the depth your ranking fell, you are going to want to collect a fair bit of different data points.

1. The search queries and keywords that were impacted by the drop.
2. What your old ranking was before the drop.
3. What your current ranking is.
4. What the difference between the two rankings are.
5. What URL was ranked best before?
6. The URL that is ranked best now.
7. The content type of the page or pages that dropped.
8. Whether or not the page was indexable.
9. If any user comments made, shed light into an issue on that page.

Collecting this information is really important because it will help you see what areas were impacted most. In some cases, only individual pages might have experienced a drop. In others, it might have been your whole website.

By collecting this information and inserting it into a spreadsheet, you can better diagnose the problem and then work on a smart and efficient means to fix it.

Don’t Forget About Mobile Rank TrackingRank tracking is the process of monitoring how well your website is ranking for various keywords in search engines.

If you look at your traffic sources, you may not surprised to learn that a huge portion of your website traffic comes from mobile. SEO rankings come in two similar buckets: mobile ranking and desktop ranking, which are two equal parts of a successful SEO strategy. But why else should you care about mobile rank tracking? In May 2019, Google announced mobile-first indexingGoogle's Mobile-First Indexing is a change to the search engine's indexing system, where sites are ranked higher in search results if they're easier to navigate on mobile devices. for new domains. If your domain is not new, keep in mind that your ranking progress could be different on mobile than it is on desktop which has been contributed to search behaviour; people search differently on mobile than they do on desktop computers. Mobile users don’t always have the time (or energy) to type out long tail keyword phrases and their searches may even include some typos, due to the speed at which they search on mobile.

How to Recover from a Rankings Drop

To recover from a ranking, drop, you need to undergo a few key steps.

Determine What Went Wrong

You should be able to see patterns in the information you have collected, and this will help point to the problems on your website.

 Use Your SEO Tools

Other ways you can check for problems is to use whatever SEO tool you have for your business. This way, you can determine if any technical or content changes have resulted in a ranking drop.

Complete an SEO Audit

Run an SEO audit on your entire website, paying particular attention to the technical SEO:

1. HTTP Status
2. Site Speed
3. Crawl ErrorsGoogle crawl errors are errors that prevent Google from accessing a page.
4. Canonical URLS
5. txt
6. Hreflang Definitions
7. Meta Robots Tag

An SEO audit, technical audit, or website audit will all go through similar components that make up an excellent website. If there are any issues, they need to be fixed. Even if they were not the cause for your page drop, they could cause future drops if you do not rectify it now.

Technical glitches directly impact user experience, so making these improvements is not just for Google, either, but to continue to provide exceptional service and experiences for your users.

Complete a Content Audit

If your technical SEO audit comes back clean, then it is time to go through your content. Content should be updated every so often to keep pages fresh and dynamic, but sometimes they are not updated correctly or at the right time.

Content should only be updated when it slips below a threshold. Content over time will rank lower, especially as its ages because it naturally becomes less relevant. Updating a blog post to reflect the best advice for 2020 is an excellent way to boost that post and get it back up to the top of the search results.

Changing content too soon, however, can result in a page rank drop.

Title Changes

Changes to your title can severely impact your ranking and should only be done when you want to revitalise the title. For example: “Top Tools in Editing” can be updated and changed to “Top Tools in Editing [2020 Update].”

With this exception, even the smallest change to a title can make algorithms see your page as a new one and rank it lower as a result. If you change the slug or URL, then any backlinking efforts you have done in the past are now useless.

Heading Changes

Headings can also impact your ranking, so use a cached version of your website to see if any changes were made to the headings and if so, when.

Content Changes

The body content changes can also impact page ranking. However, it is essential to remember if you have made intentional, critical updates that it can take a while for any new SEO strategies in regard to your content to become fully realised.

Meta DescriptionWebsite meta descriptions are used to inform web users on search engines about the content of webpages. CTR

An excellent meta description can be the call-to-action your site needs, but if it is not well written or you recently changed it this could be having an organic effect to your ranking and to your site visitations. Improve it or reset your meta description.

Improve Your SEO Strategy

It is impossible to maintain a #1 position without a great SEO strategy in place. That is why SEO is an ongoing approach similar to marketing, and just like marketing going back and improving it based on the numbers of today is how you can benefit in the future. If your ranking has dropped, now is a great time to use it as an advantage and finally implement a great SEO strategy for your entire brand.

Audit Your Approach

Your own SEO strategy and efforts could be harming you, which is why it is always a good idea to audit your entire approach every so often to ensure that the strategies and tactics that you use are working and not bringing your pages down. This is done even by SEO specialists. After all, what was the best practice yesterday can become a bad practice after an algorithm update. The tasks that occur with an audit include things like backlink audits, page audits, site audit and more. The point is to check your SEO strategy on-site and off-site, to make sure that you have not inadvertently hurt your own ranking through black-hat techniques.

Use Managed SEO Services

SEO management services can take the guesswork and stress out of managing the SEO on your own website. Diagnosing the issues behind a ranking drop, keeping on top of algorithm changes and the newest and best SEO practices of the day are all tasks that can be handled by an SEO management company like Click Intelligence.

By taking the stress and confusion of managing your own site’s SEO out of your equation, you can instead focus on the customers visiting your site, working to provide them with outstanding service and growing your relationship.

Understanding what goes behind an excellent SEO strategy is a smart move and will help you be able to choose the right service and company to partner with. With a great partnership, you can coast through any drop in your ranking with the firm knowledge that your site will be back up and in its prime once again soon, either after site fixes or from a new SEO strategy approach.