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Any online business should be regularly monitoring their organic rankings. When your rankings suddenly decline, it can be detrimental to your business, as your brands visibility decreases and may give your competitors an advantage over you.

A drop is rankings can lead to less traffic, revenue, enquiries and engagement. If you are an online-only business, this can be catastrophic and put a strain on your finances until the problem is resolved – which could take some time as things with SEO are never overnight.

As soon as you notice a problem it is essential that you diagnose the issue as quickly as possible and start measures to put things right. The longer you leave it the longer it will take for Google to identify your corrections and (hopefully) reinstate your rankings.

Why Have My Rankings Dropped?

When a sudden decrease in rankings occurs, it is usually one of three things:

A change occurred on your website

If your rankings have dropped because of something you have done on your website then generally these are the easiest to fix because you know what changes you’ve made. Tiny changes which you make without a thought can actually be detrimental to your organic rankings. Changes such as updating sections of code, amending page content, incorrectly redirecting URLs and much more can lower the value of your pages and make it less relevant to your keywords, therefore causing it to fall in the search results.

An external factor changed

External factors are much more difficult to control and monitor. Drops in rankings usually occur when external elements such as an authoritative link to your website being removed or a competitor has launched a new website with content much keyword rich and higher quality than yours. It is important that you regularly monitor the health of your website to know who is linking to you, what your competitors are doing and how you can move with the times to continuously stay ahead of the curve.

Google changed the algorithm

The thing about Google is that they never tell you when they are making big changes to the algorithm, and arguably are constantly making small modifications that can be devastating to individual industries and websites. However, Google have previously stated “if you notice a sharp decline in your rankings and traffic, it’s a good indicator that you need to dig in and find out where Google feels your site is falling short of expectations”.

See where your rankings have fallen: is it sitewide or just a specific subsection of your website? If it is sitewide then you should perform a technical SEO audit to identify any underlying problems, if it is a page or section then you may want to rewrite your content or revert back to your original content if you have changed it prior to the decline.

Contact us now to find out how we can diagnose and fix your ranking problems!