A sudden drop in your websites search ranking can leave you lost and confused, there’s no one to tell you every time you drop a position and nothing really to tell you why. So it can be hard to understand what caused your drop in rankings.
Here are a number of reasons that your website might drop in search rankings and what to do about each.
- Google updates impacting your search ranking
- Competitors making gains
- Not doing enough of what Google expects
- Doing what Google forbids/does not favour
Google Updates Impacting Your Search Ranking
Often a drop in search rankings is due to Google updating their search algorithm (how they rank websites).
In this case you can generally find the cause from news sites explaining how others have been affected.
Major updates are generally made every 6-12 months, with much smaller updates happening every week, or even daily.
Most recently the big G unveiled their latest “Mobile Search Update” which has led to millions of “non-mobile friendly” websites falling in the search rankings. You can see if Google deems your website as “mobile friendly” using their free checker.
What action should you take?
If your website drops in rankings and you’re not sure why, check to see if there have been any recent Google updates in the period your search rankings dropped, look to see if these correlate with your website.
Competitors Making Search Gains
In other cases it’s because your competitors have made gains themselves, leaving you lagging behind.
This can be a little easier to analyse as you can make physical comparisons, there are plenty of tools available for this. Just by putting two web URL’s in, SEO software will scan the web to make a decision on which is more likely to receive higher rankings, and why..
You can then use this data to see what your competitors are doing specifically that is gaining them higher rankings than you.
What action should you take?
Consider instructing an SEO expert to run a competitor analysis on the websites appearing higher than you in the search results.
This should give you actionable advice as to where you should make improvements to compete.
Not doing enough of what Google expects
One of the most common reasons that may cause your rankings to drop, in relation to both of the above, is not doing enough of what Google expects.
To be quite honest, there are lots you could do that Google would make Google favour your site over others, some are a one time job, like creating a privacy policy, whereas others require consistent maintenance, else your competitors will take your place.
Here are some of the most important (See a full 2013 report here):
- Regular, unique & valuable content – Quite self-explanatory, one of the best ways to achieve this is through introducing and maintaining a site blog, just make sure not to put out any old articles, only those that provide a good user experience and some form of benefit. So learning about a new product, your opinion, a how to guide etc..
- Quality social media presence – Social media now plays a very big role in your search engine rankings, Google relies on social media in determining the popularity of your website & brand. Just make sure to focus on your industry and keep it relevant…
What’s important in social media for SEO?
- Google+ (Unsurprisingly)
- Facebook shares
- Facebook comments
- Usage of Pinterest
- Tweets
- Good quality backlinks (From external websites) – Backlinks are still highly valuable in SEO, now days Google expects to see a mix of links from different types of web pages within your industry.
This means backlinks from within articles, links from forums, links from old websites, blog comments, a mix of keyword anchor text, news websites, from new & old websites, again focus on your industry.
Consider using Backlink Watch to analyse the number of external links to your site and information about each.
You’re doing things that Google explicitly forbids, or perhaps doesn’t favour
There are many practices that Google explicitly forbids and will penalize website owners for. Some of these include:
- Keyword stuffing – This means putting keywords closely together on a page of content, to the extent that it becomes hard to read.
- Instead use synonyms of keywords and don’t repeat the same keywords repetitively (above 3-4 times)
- Duplicate content – Unless you are the original owner of an article, using the same pieces of text on your site, that appear elsewhere, may result in low rankings for that page. Also using the same text on multiple pages throughout your site. You can use a tool such as Copyscape which searches the web for duplicate content of a web page. This will help you to keep your content unique!
- Keyword dilution – This involves repeating the same keywords/phrases throughout your page titles, headings and subheadings, or simply using the same keyword too many times throughout a page.
- Try to limit to 3-4 occurrences on a page, including the <head></head> title that appears in the browser.
- Paid backlinks – Google does not take favourably to paid links that pass pagerank (links that allow the search engine bot to follow the hyperlink, named ‘rel=”dofollow”’), if you wish to pay for a link from a website, ensure that it’s given the tag ‘rel=”nofollow”’, this means Google won’t follow the link to index the page.
- Lots of outgoing links on a web page – Having too many links on your page can send Google away from your own page, putting more favour on others. Consider using rel=”nofollow” on your textlinks so that search engines do not follow/index them.
Need help getting back on track?
If you’ve experienced any of the above or still aren’t sure why you have dropped in Google rankings, speak to Elvin Web Marketing about how we can help get you back to the top spot!