Every business wants to grow.
Every brand owner wants to increase sales and make more money. The steady flow of traffic to your website is the only way to be successful in today’s technical and online environment.
Little that they know, the major source of traffic comes from Google, which makes it crucial to rank on the top pages. But this is significant to gain a good amount of traffic, visibility and brand credibility.
If your site shows up on the first page of Google it suggests that Google is trusting you and your services and is approving your offerings products or services to its millions of users.
But the things become very hard for you when you begin losing the position once again here and when your website experiences a significant drop in organic search rankings As a result you will lose traffic, business sometimes loses credibility, technical glitches also may lead to black-listing and even drop in revenue.
Here are a couple of reasons your SEO ranking might have dropped significantly:
1. A New Google Update
Google is always looking for ways to improve strategies and results by making algorithm changes.
The algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.
The algorithms of Google change so frequently, leaving many companies to wonder what they should do now to fix the issue. If not managed well, this at times also result in lower site rankings, significant edits in the website and sometimes even lead to restructuring
Of course, you could miss out on several points to determine the actual reason since understanding how Google algorithms actually work requires expertise. To avoid being crippled by Google’s updates, use effective cross-channel marketing and traffic strategy that includes social media and other marketing channels. Keep your website clean and optimized schedule regular checks if need be.
Like many others, you may have forgotten to fix the dead links and redirect before getting your site live. Always checking the dead or inaccessible pages of the site is important for any good SEO.
It is very easy to fix this issue if you have basic information on Google Console since the dashboard will show if any such issues exist on your current site.
Having a developer handy who understands the basic google set-up should be of great help.
3. Checking the Lost Links
Another reason your site ranking might have dropped is that you have lost links.
It’s normal if you have lost a couple of inbound links. But if you see that you have lost a lot of links, this might be the reason for the drop in rankings.
It generally happens when google finds out that the links are unnatural and Google hates unnatural links more than anything else. Keep in mind that Google can penalize you for a long time or sometimes permanently if this continues.
On the other hand, if inbound links to your site are broken or lost, you have to find out exactly where those links are coming from and why they are broken. So that you can either remove, replace, or retain them. But please make sure that your SEO and SEM team is checking it and understanding the root problem.
Sometimes the links break or change because of the new Google update. In that case, you can request the site owner to restore them or fix the related cause to retain
4. You Have Got Any New Links Too Quickly
This is also one of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques. Many professionals offer this as quick results which are visible in the short term but bounce back with negative reviews and repercussions later. Therefore leaving the site owner confused and this also calls for a lot of rework in some cases.
Despite the fact that Google considers the regular link loss as a negative activity on your site, It’s also bad if your site is gaining a large number of links quickly. The process should ideally be regularized and
Google considers this as a suspicious activity. In professional language, it is known as the link spam that may trigger Google to punish your site for the presence of unnatural connections.
Link spamming can lead you to get your site penalized. Take the time to develop a high quality link building strategy to avoid getting penalized by Google and grow your organic search traffic. Always choose quality over quantity.
5. Maybe You Have Received Site Penalties
In most of the cases, people are unaware of the manual and algorithm penalties from Google.
You can check if your website was penalized by an automatic penalty is to login to Google analytics and review your Google organic traffic. If you find a drastic drop in your traffic during the dates that Google released an algorithm change, then there is a possibility that you were hit and that’s the reason that your traffic dropped.
You are much advised to have a look under the “Manual Actions” section to check if any suggestions are there from Google to sort out any such issues.
6. Check What Your Target Audience is looking
Gone are the days when SEO and SEM were restricted to a couple of methods. Earlier SEO worked fine because the digitization of businesses was still in its nascent stage. With technology and small phones reaching the entire customer base across segments, the SEO game is evolving. However, today the manner in which it works has totally changed. It is also because the digital behaviors and consumer insights have evolved. They expect simplification, ease of access and user driven interface.
In the previous times putting the keywords directly from the URL to the content, headers and title was sufficient to get your site in good ranking.
But nowadays that’s not enough to gain a good amount of traffic. You need content marketing to build your brand. You have to get into details, analyze the visitor behaviors and must find out what your audience needs. Try to see and understand from the point of view of your audience. What phrases your audience is using to find the content and write your content accordingly.
7. Page Speed
Page speed matters a lot. How fast your page will load directly affects your ranking. The internet speed has evolved from 2G to 5G and so are the expectations of world wide web visitors.
If your page loads slowly your bounce rate will increase because no one likes to wait. There are so many more websites where they can find their answers and they will just leave your website and it is also important for the user experience.
To find out your website speed go to google page speed insights and work on your page speed.
Here’s a 10 Point checklist for SEO and SEM experts who want to keep up their work:
- Always keep your content optimized because the content is part of your website.
- Maintain the content freshness and avoid plagiarism or duplicate content. Quality content is the priority for good SEO.
- You should know about your target audience, the things they like, their pain points and the questions they can ask from Google. By knowing what questions they ask and what types of queries they might ask google also helps you in keyword research.
- Keep your On-page optimization always in check by reviewing your title tags, meta description, optimize your images and videos, alt attributes and proper use of heading tags.
- Focus on interlinking your content with each other properly. Interlinking gives Google an idea of your website and also improves user experience. Give more link value to your important pages and posts than less valuable pages. This will set up a hierarchy on your site. By using the right interlinking strategy you can boost your SEO.
- Claim Google my business listing for your company. It is essential for Local SEO as it allows your business listing to appear in the local search results for queries specific to your product or services.
- Setup Google webmaster and analytics for your site to analyse the data for your SEO. Without setting these accounts you can’t analyse your SEO data.
- Make your site mobile user friendly. If you will notice around you the major number of people are using browsers on their mobile devices. Which makes it crucial for your site to be mobile friendly and also for better user experience.
- Use Accelerated Mobile (AMP). It is an open source project that enables webpages to load almost instantly for mobile users.
- Make sure that your SEO strategy follows Google Webmaster Guidelines. Using black hat SEO techniques can increase your site ranking rapidly but it can also get your site penalized for a long time or sometimes permanently.
- Your site should have an XML sitemap because they make it easier for Google to crawl your website pages.
- Add testimonials and privacy statements on your site to build trust.
Conclusion
Although sometimes it becomes really hard to understand the reasons why your rankings on Google are dropping significantly. But if you actually work on the above-mentioned points and work consistently about your content marketing and SEO audits, you will understand the reasons behind your dropping site ranks.
