Your ranking on the search engine result pages, or SERPs for short, is what tells you the success of your SEO efforts. But, picture this.
You’re putting in months of work to optimize your website, create relevant content, and find backlink opportunities so that you finally see your site on the first page of the SERPs. All that hard work finally paid off and you’re now generating traffic that you know your brand deserves. Then one day, as if straight out of a horror movie, you don’t see your site appearing in the searches at all. Your heart sinks. In a panic, you start to research how this could have happened and you suddenly stumble across this article telling you that it’s going to be okay.
It’s quite possible you might never encounter an obstacle like this, but if you do, we’re here to help you and your website recover from whatever caused it to drop in the rankings in the first place.
Did your ranking actually drop?
Before going down the rabbit hole of finding out how your website could have dropped in ranking so drastically, you’ll want to confirm that it actually happened. Occasionally, the drop is only temporary and websites recover on their own after a short period of time. The reason behind this is unknown but it’s likely that it has to do with the Google algorithm being tested or altered.
Using the Google Search Console, verify your ranking and check to see if there’s a steep reduction in your organic traffic. Also, take a look at your average deviation in weekly traffic in Google Analytics for the past year to see if there’s a large discrepancy. It’s not uncommon for sites to experience swings in their site traffic so by analyzing and comparing the SEO traffic fluctuation throughout the year, you might find that there’s nothing to be alarmed about. If after all of this, you know that traffic has legitimately dropped, keep on reading!
Google Penalty Rank Drops
Since Google is the most popular search engine, it’s appropriate that we look at the two different types of penalties that we might see from it. If your site has encountered a sudden significant drop in the search results of about 10-20 positions, it’s likely due to a penalty. Your Google Webmaster Tools would be able to help you diagnose why these actions have been taken against your site.
Manual Action Penalty
A manual action penalty is imposed by people employed by Google to review pages and determine if sites are compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. Some common reasons for manual action penalties include the site being hacked, the site having user-generated spam, or cloaking.
Algorithmic Penalty
Algorithmic penalties are automatic and typically due to an update that Google puts out. Despite constantly changing, Google’s algorithm senses signals from websites to determine how a site should be ranked. Google has crawlers that help it collect data on different sites and if they notice a site that has several negative signals, it could be punished.
You’ll have to use the Google Search Console to find the reasons behind a manual action penalty. Check “manual actions” under the “Securities and Manual Actions” tab. After making the appropriate fixes, submit a reconsideration request to let Google know that you believe you’ve taken the necessary steps to adhere to their guidelines and that you won’t let it happen again. If it was an algorithm penalty that affected your site, check to see when your site was hit and what algorithm was implemented at that time. From there, you’ll be able to figure out what changes you need to make to adhere to the new rules. Keep in mind that you won’t know if your changes are successful until the algorithm is run again. It’s also important to note that just because your ranking dropped, it doesn’t guarantee that it was caused by a Google penalty.
Negative SEO
With negative SEO, the goal is to target a competitor and build spammy links to their site or even scrape their content to reuse elsewhere to take away the original website’s ranking. It’s rare that a negative SEO attack would be successful enough to actually affect you, but if it does happen, it could cause you to drop in ranking for a lot of keywords.
Take a look at your backlink profile and check to see if there’s a spike in the number of backlinks that aligns with the time your traffic had dipped. Also, take note of any penalty risks or high spam scores that you might see.
If you find that this happens to be the cause of your decrease in ranking, you’ll want to contact the owners of all the spammy domains linking to you and ask them to take down the backlinks. If this is unsuccessful, you can disavow these links yourself using Google’s disavow tool and following the text format listed on their help center.
On-Page Violations
Occasionally, when you’re building your website and making changes, you may do something unintentionally that creates a poor user experience or provides little to no quality content for people who visit your site. Also, check to see if any 301 redirects were implemented incorrectly recently or if any changes were made that might have caused your pages to no longer be indexed.
Competitors Are Outranking You
If none of the above has helped, there’s always a possibility that competitors are also putting in the same amount of SEO effort and are getting better results. This typically wouldn’t result in a huge dip in your ranking but it’s worth taking a look at what competitors are doing because this research could even help you in your own SEO efforts. It could be that they’ve done some technical optimization or even started to integrate Google Ads into their marketing strategy to appear first in the search results.
Overall, SEO is something you should have on your radar and constantly work on. It may take some time now, but it’ll pay off down the road when you’re getting leads naturally without having to invest and rely solely on ads.