Do youremember when your business website used to rank really well on Google? It was showing up everywhere on the search engines and you were receiving a stack of traffic that was bring in leads and sale, wasn’t it?! Then…BANG! Something went wrong and your leads and sales began to dry up. After checking your analytics reports, you notice a sudden drop in traffic and your rankings have either dropped or disappeared completely. If you aren’t panicking yet, you should be. How could this have happened? But more important what can be done to fix the problem and get back to where you were?
Rankings can drop for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s due to a mistake that could have easily been prevented. If this is the case, and you have been doing your own SEO, then it’s time to get in a professional SEO agency to help you out. In other cases a drop in rankings may have naturally occurred due to an intentional action on your part. Below are five reasons why you might experience a drop in rankings and what you can to do fix each case.
Tracking the Wrong Rankings
In recent years there has been a shift toward natural language when it comes to searches. This means users are typing in complete sentences rather than just keywords. If your company is only tracking generic keywords, then your keyword strategy is almost definitely outdated. Those who are looking for you are using new keywords and phrases, so you will need to update your keyword strategy to accommodate your users in mind.
A New Website
If you have launched a new design for your website that already exists you can expect your rankings to drop, regardless of what you do to prepare for the launch, and regardless of how much better the new website is than the older one from an SEO perspective. However, to minimize the drop your SEO agency should have put in a 301 redirect in place. As long as you have discussed the change in design with your SEO agency they should be able to optimize it prior to the launch. In saying that, you should expect a temporary drop even if it has been optimized. The good news is that your rankings will be back to where they were within 1-2 months.
Low Quality Links
Unfortunately, there was a time many years ago when companies made the mistake of buying thousands of links at a low price. Google is very much about rewarding websites that have earned links and, conversely, they penalize those sites who have large quantities of low quality links pointing to them. Every effort should be made to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. If that doesn’t work then disavowing those links would be a last resort if you can prove to Google you have done everything possible to get rid of them.
Losing Good Links
While attracting low quality links is enough for your rankings to drop, losing high quality links has the same effect. The reasons for this happening can vary from the website or the webpage disappearing, or the link pointing to your website has been removed. The solution with this issue is to be continually building high quality links. In this instance, building means attracting, because your website will be rewarded if the quality links come naturally. To get these links you need to create compelling and quality content that people find interesting enough to read and share. You can do this yourself or hire a content marketing agency ) to create a content strategy for you.
Google Updates
Google appears to be rolling out a new search algorithm at least once a year. While some algorithms are just updates and are minor in impact, there are some that are quite significant and are able to disrupt quite a lot. The point is that when Google makes an update, rankings are changed negatively for the websites that aren’t compliant. If you want to avoid death by Google update, follow their webmaster guidelines as best practice and only engage in white hat SEO tactics. This is the sure-fire way to rankings that will generate traffic now as well as in the years to come.
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