Search engine optimization is a tricky practice and no one can guarantee how and when the ranking will slip and some other website will eat up that space. Regardless of domain, ranking is a common thing to happen as there could be several reasons behind it.
However, there are multiple ways that can help you regain that ranking and boost your SEO efforts once again. Also, you can choose a suitable SEO packages as well. In this article, we will have a look at the top five important things that you need to do after your website’s Google ranking drops.
1. Conduct a basic audit first
If you experience that your ranking is constantly dropping then you need to conduct a basic SEO audit of your site. Check for all the technical factors that might need an upgrade. We got so busy running our businesses and we hardly get a chance to conduct a technical site audit on a frequent basis. To make sure everything is working up and running, conduct a basic audit first.
In this audit, go through all the aspects that are important from the UX and SEO perspective. Check things like robots.txt file, whether sitemap needs an update if the site has broken links, or the bounce rate is high, and so on. It’s important to fix all these technical issues because they can impose a negative impact on your user base and search engine bots.
2. Check for a penalty
Google is very straightforward in terms of imposing any kind of manual action or penalty. If the site has violated some guidelines and Google has noticed that, then there are high chances that the site will face a penalty.
If you experience a drop, you can check if there is any kind of manual action on your site from Google. For checking this, go to the Google Search Console and click on Security and Manual Actions. Click on the Manual Action tab and there you will find a notice if there is any penalty.
Google will also tell you the possible reason why this penalty has been imposed on your site and also you can fix that as soon as possible. Once you fix the manual action, you can click on the submit option to check your site again as the issue has been fixed.
3. Check for a competitor attack
One more significant reason why you are facing a ranking drop is getting outperformed by a competitor. If a rival has taken your position on certain keywords, then you will face a severe drop in traffic because you are ranking on lower positions now.
To check this, you need to check all your keywords that your site ranks for and see if there is any drop in the keywords’ ranking. If you notice that a couple of primary keywords are being hit by the competitor, then you need to update the content.
For fixing this, you need to first make a list of all the keywords that have faced a drop in recent times and see pages corresponding to them. You need to update the content with more relevant and new information. By doing this, there are high chances that you will start ranking again for the keywords once Google and other search engines crawl your site again.
4. Check your backlinks
If your site has lost some important backlinks then there are high chances that your site is losing traffic due to that. For this, you need to conduct a backlink analysis and check which are the newly lost backlinks. If you notice that some important links got broken, then you need to take immediate action to fix them.
If you notice a site has removed your link, then you need to outreach them once again and tell them that the link is removed. It happens quite a few that the other site owner has removed the link just by mistake and not intentionally. On the other side, even if they have removed the links due to some reason, take a follow-up and fix that issue.
5. Analyze the site speed
The last most important reason why your site is experiencing a drop in ranking is your site’s loading speed. Even if the site’s loading speed is increased by one second, there are chances that the site will lose several hundred users in a go. So, it becomes important for you to check whether the site is loading slow and it’s not working at the optimum level.
You can use Google’s free tool to check the speed of your site for both desktop and mobile versions. If you see that the speed has reduced, you need to fix this issue as soon as possible.
These were the top five things that you need to do if your site is experiencing a ranking drop. There are high chances that once you check and fix these issues, your site will regain those rankings.