Know Your Website And How To Recover From Search Engine Ranking Drop

On the web that is growing, changes will happen. And when they happen, they happen frequently. In terms of search engine ranking, a change can either give you benefit or lost.

If you see website is losing rank or having a decrease in traffic, there should be a cause and you need to find the reason fast.

A drop in ranking can frustrate even veteran SEO professionals. There are so many things that could have gone wrong, and blind assumptions for the cause can waste you a lot of time before any correct procedures are commenced.

If you see your website in losing rank, there are a few things you can do to pinpoint the problem.

From your a change in search engines, your website's design to its structure and your server's performance, settings, links and competitors, there are a lot of things that could have happened.

Analytics

Know Your Website's Rank

Before driving to any conclusion, you need to make sure there was actually a ranking change that happened on your website. To find out, you must answer the following:

  • Has organic traffic dropped on certain pages?
  • How does the affected page's traffic compare week-over-week before the suspected change happened?
  • Is the drop significant? Or only on certain times, like on weekends or holidays?
  • What report does Google Search Console is showing?
  • Using analytics software, how are the performance of clicks, impressions, keywords and others?

Know Changes In Search Engines' Algorithms

Search engines change their algorithms from time to time. Google as the most prominent search engine of the web, changes its algorithms to reflect user habit and to improve experience. The search giant is known to roll out new algorithm updates at least once a day.

While most of the time it remain silent about any changes it made, you need to at least find out whether or not they have changed or updated their algorithms.

You can seek information from SEO articles or blogs, or even forums that are talking about search engines. There, webmasters and web owners may share some significant changes that happened to their website/blog. See what's what and note the date.

If there was really an update on a search engine's algorithms, you can recover by changing your approach to SEO in one way or another. The things you need to make sure are: what the search engines are penalizing, and why did they made the change. Read their recommendations and avoid penalties by following what they say.

After understanding what change the search engines have made, you need to put together a new strategy to pull your website away from the penalty, or at least to avoid the next possible penalty.

Know Your Backlinks

There are many online tools to help you in getting insights about your website's backlinks. Using the publicly and widely available tools, you can get information about:

  • Noticeable site-wide link drop.
  • Which of your pages that were affected.
  • Which of your page's link that have changed.
  • The number of internal link counts.
  • A change in structure or URL.
  • A change in contents or navigations.
  • Etc..

By knowing the above, you can figure out how and why your website has lost a number of links. You can try to regain or replace those lost backlinks by:

  • Reaching out to those websites that were having your links.
  • Reach out to more websites and blogs.
  • Invest in new links to quickly replace the lost ones.

Further reading: The Reasons Why Your Backlinks Aren't Helping Your Search Engine Rank

Know Your Internal Links

There are backlinks and there are internal links. Internal links are those links that are available on your website's pages that link visitors (both humans and bots) to other relevant pages.

Common internal links are as follows:

  • Navigation (top, side, footer).
  • Suggested/new pages/promoted pages or similar.
  • Links and anchors in your contents.

You need to check to see whether there were changes that have been made to those links that target the affected pages.

If this is the issue, make sure that those links are still available and working. And check whether those links can affect user-experience and search engines' capability in crawling.

Know Your Server And Website's Settings And Performance

A tiny change on your server's configuration can affect the ranking of your website. And so can speed.

Google uses algorithms and machine learning to determine rank. What his means, they measure the value of your pages based on clickthrough rate from their SERPs and how long your website's visitors were staying on your pages before "bouncing off" from your website.

Things that may cause a rank drop in this category, include:

  • Performance on both backend and frontend of your website.
  • The structure of your website.
  • Features that can alter user-experience.
  • Intrusive ads, popups.
  • Etc..
Analytics chart

Know What Changes Have Been Made To Your Website And Its Pages

As your website grows, you may need to add (or remove) certain features. You may also change some of its contents or your website's design and its structure to appeal new goals. After knowing which of your pages were affected by the rank drop, you need to check whether the new version of the page is really relevant and needed.

Another common change is a change in the URL. If a website has changed one of its page's URL, search engines will see it as a new page, even if the content is still the same. See if you can change the new URL back to the old one. If not, make sure the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL.

The next thing to check is the page's title that use either H1, H2 or H3 tag. Know whether a targeted keywords has been removed from them, or has its density changed. If this is what happened, you can change them by reverting them back to the old version.

Read more: Rank Higher With The Best Keywords That Matches Your Contents

Beside changes to your website's design or structure, the robots.txt file can also affect how search engines see and crawl your website's pages. You can get some insights by using Google's cache to see what Google sees, and use Google Search Console to know any server or crawl errors.

Know Your Competiton

As the the web grows, the number of websites are also growing. Those many websites which some are your competitors, are competing against you to gain the top spot on search engines' SERP.

So besides knowing the changes that might have happened on search engines and your website, the next thing is to know your competitors that move on the same niche as yours. Know whether their websites are also affected.

Your website's rank may have changed, not because you did something wrong, but could possibly caused by your competitors in doing something better than you. If others that are competing against you are getting a lot stronger than you are, your ranking may drop to reflect their growing effort to come on top.

What you need to do:

  • Know which of your competitors are gaining or losing ranking.
  • Which of your competitors are gaining or losing backlinks.
  • Which of your competitors are changing their internal link structures.
  • Did they redesigned their website? How good are they if compared to their previous design?
  • How are their social media strategy and marketing?
  • Etc..

If this is the issue, your lost in rank is because your competitors are doing a lot better that you. What you need to do here, is catch up to regain what you've lost. You can learn from them, see their strategies and implement those that you know will work for you too.

Stalk and imitate your competitors to improve your efforts, but don't copy them blindly. Know which of their strategy that can work for you, but do the attempt better than them.

Conclusion

Not just you, people can start panicking if they see a sudden drop in ranking. This is a common fear for any webmasters and web owners out there.

But always remember that a rank drop is a result that has been caused by something. Something should have happened that made your website to rank lower, and this is where you need to find out. So before driving to any aimless conclusion, you need to make sure what has changed and correct that problem only.

Related: Penalized By Google? Here Are The Things You Can Do To Get Back On Track