Top Steps to Take When Your Search Rankings Drop

If you are a site owner, you have probably experienced the roller coaster ride of your website ranking going up and down. While the little ups and downs are normal and not concerning, the alarming ones are the sudden and more steep. An example case for this could be: you adopted a new SEO strategy, but instead of pulling you up on the ranking ladder, it’s bringing it down.

In such scenarios, site owners with no SEO expertise mostly panic. As a result, they end up making the situation even worse by performing steps that are the least important. The right approach to follow after such scenarios is to consider all the contributing factors that might have caused the drop. For this, you can follow the step-by-step guide discussed in this article to prevent your rankings from dropping further.

Let’s dig deeper into the topic and uncover the top steps every site owner must take when the rankings drop. Scroll down to learn more about all this in detail.

5 Steps to Follow When Your Search Rankings Go Down
Every site owner has their own way of improving rankings, and sometimes things can go wrong. It can be either due to a mistake or your lack of knowledge of search engines’ ranking algorithms. The best way to tackle this is by checking with the algorithm updates first, then checking organic traffic, reviewing top traffic-driving keywords, looking for technical website changes, etc. Scroll down to learn more about all this in detail.

Here are five steps to follow when your site experiences a drop in rankings.

1. Verify By How Much Rankings Fell

There are various reasons why this might happen, but before taking any action, benchmark the site position from the last-known ranking to confirm that your rankings truly fell. To do this effectively, you can leverage the keyword ranking analysis on standard SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz.

Along with this, you can also make use of Google’s Search Console, which automatically tracks the average search rankings over time. Also, if you have an idea about your previous ranking, you can switch to incognito mode and search for a relevant query that your site was ranking for. This is because with incognito mode, the search engine doesn’t track your search history, so they show the same results as they would for other users.

2. Check for Algorithm Updates

One of the most common reasons behind a sudden drop in search rankings is a Google algorithm update. Ever experienced that your latest SEO strategy seems to be working fine, and after the update, everything goes off? If yes, then you are not alone. Google algorithm updates can sometimes shake a website ranking drastically.

This is because Google doesn’t like any low-quality or misleading results appearing at the top, and therefore, it releases regular updates. Updates are announced on Google’s status page, so you must check if any dates align with your ranking drops.

3. Check Your Organic Traffic

Once you know there has been an update that might have caused this, then the next thing is to check its date against your total organic traffic. This will help you identify if there has been a drop at the same time. For this, you can use various tools like Ahrefs site explorer, following these steps:

Plug in your domain and then scroll down to the overview 2.0 chart.
Then uncheck everything except the “Avg. organic traffic”.
Set the timeline to All and Weekly because it will let you see the complete timeline for organic traffic.

4. Review Your Top Traffic-Driving Keywords

Once you have found the time when your ranking dropped, the next thing is to see which of your website’s keywords have lost rankings. You can also utilize various tools like Ahrefs, where you need to head to the organic keywords report in the site explorer.

You can do this by comparing keywords year on year (YoY), so you need to add a YoY “compare filter”. Then under the change column, you will see if it had any significant drop for a specific website’s keyword.

5. Seek SEO Experts

At such times, if you don’t do anything on time, you will struggle to revive your ranking on search engines. This is because competition is very tough, and it won’t take much time for your competitors to get past you. However, this can also be an overwhelming situation where, without SEO experience, improving rankings again would be a struggle.

For this, you can leverage the help of field professionals who know what the right course of action in such scenarios is. They can quickly identify what’s wrong and then come up with solutions to maintain your rankings. Considering this, you can refer to the best SEO company in Dubai to leverage experts’ knowledge and prevent your site rankings from dropping further.

Is Your Website Dropping Its Ranking Too?

Dropping ranking is alarming because not doing anything about it means losing revenue opportunities. You can count on professional SEO experts to prevent the drops in your ranking and improve it for best results. Feel free to contact professionals and enhance your site ranking.