You made your website, filled it with content and when reviewing its performance. The website is gaining the ranks in Google results, and everything might be great. But recently your website experienced a sudden drop in its ranking. Having checked your main website pages and found nothing special, you still want to figure out what happened?
Do not worry because this happens with websites more often than you think. With some tweaks and optimizations, you can get your website to rise up the ranks again! Let’s review!
1) A Website Audit – Easiest Trick In The Book
The problem may lie on the surface – errors on the site, bugs, duplicates, problems with indexing. We can suggest that you should first dig through your content, website structure or optimization, but all those can be avoided from doing manually with just one single step – run a thorough website audit. Essentially, website auditing is the process of going through several aspects of a website to seek out the discrepancies that cause a stall in your website’s popularity. Nowadays, there are many website audit tools available online, free and paid, comprehensive and not.
The SE Ranking Website Audit is suitable for this task, as it sorts errors into technical, content, links, meta. Also, all errors are divided by importance, which can help you distribute efforts and save time. As an alternative, you may use SEMrush or GTmetrics.
2) Review Recent Website Changes
You might know the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But we like to tinker with our website time to time, trying to make it that much more appealing. Sometimes we like to revamp the existing pictures with something more high quality, which can mess up your load times. Other times, it might seem best to tweak the content of a well-performing page to get even more visitors. Again, it can lead to you messing up the
So the best way to solve the problem here is to back trace the steps you took in revamping or tweaking your website and either revert to the way it was or execute changes in a less obtrusive manner. Even the changes we feel minor can have a very major impact on the website. A small tip to keep in mind!
3) Are You Still in Trend? Where Is the Competition Headed?
If your website has sizable traction, then most probably, it will be from organic searches (which is the way it should be!). So if your website has been losing ranks recently, it can also because of the shift in trend or customer preferences. People search the most on current trends, and then these trends slowly start to subside in popularity, it will also result in a dip in ranks because the website isn’t getting too many search tags as it did.
The best method to see if your niche is losing fan base is to directly tap into Google’s knowledge bank. Luckily, Google has made it very easy for users to do so with Google Trends. Search your subject using the google trends search bar and you can see the amount of search volume over a certain span of time. If the graph is on a steady decline, then the diminishing consumer interest can be the reason for the slow progress of your website in the banking department.
In such cases, the best course of action would be to concentrate on what is in the everlasting trend if your company is not ready for a quick switch of goods or services. You can use the same google trends tool to find out topics with good future potential.
4) A Change in Google’s SE Algorithm – Keeping up with Google
Another reason why your website isn’t ranking well may come from Google itself! There are millions of websites on the Internet and Google ranks them in its search engine by the use of algorithms that they develop. The exact parameters on which these algorithms rank a website is unknown but the thing that is that most certain about these algorithms is that they get updated periodically. Google doesn’t always announce each refresh or update, but such changes do have a significant effect on the ranking paradigm.
If your website has been ranking well and suddenly it dropped, then it is worth checking out the news for any details on a Google algorithm update. Sometimes, Google will be kind enough to share the details on the algorithm update and you will be able to determine how the new update impacted your website ranking. Necessarily follow Danny Sullivan’s SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) and Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) on Twitter to know everything about Google updates with comments from influential experts immediately. Once, you know what you should do to make the website pleasing for the new set of the algorithm, it’s all about optimizing accordingly!
5) Violations of Google Policies – It Is Going to Hurt!
There is another reason why up and coming websites suddenly lose their ranks. And its quite a serious issue – violating Google’s Webmaster Policy guidelines. The easiest way to know if you are penalized by Google is by heading over to Google Search Console>Search Traffic>Manual Actions. Once you are in the manual action tabs, you will see a banner that says your websites may not perform well in ranks. This can be caused violated the webmaster guidelines.
Plagiarism, keyword stuffing, buying backlinks and every trick in the black hat
Don’t Panic On Rank Loss, Persistence Is Key!
Ranking a website to the first SERP is no easy task. The unpredictable nature of ranking algorithms adds another layer of complexity to it. But that doesn’t mean that you should lose hope in your website if it has stopped rising positions in Google. Follow the hints we have mentioned and you will find the reason for the slow progress in no time!
