Be it a few high ranking pages or a massive plunge across the board, dropped rankings can be an SEO horror story for many!
So what do you do when your ranking goes down?
Google never fails to remind us that they update almost everyday which can sometimes result in your rankings going the wrong way. So when you see your rankings take a dive, DO NOT PANIC!!!
Strategic troubleshooting can help take things in the right direction. These tested tricks shall help you get back on track with your organic SEO rankings!
Take Care of the Basics
When deploying and monitoring keyword performance and focusing on the advanced strategies, it is likely to overlook the on-page SEO ABCs. Just a quick fix on your website can resolve a lot of issues, which you could be trying to improve with things like anchor text ratio, link velocity, or citation optimization.
Next, make sure you haven’t set the restrictions too tightly file in the top-level directory of your web server, preventing search bots from crawling any of your main pages. Double-check the robots.txt file, and if you find anything missing, upload a more permissive file to the server.
Don’t Forget the SEO Basics
Setting your SEO basics right ensures that you are prepared to compete in the game. Although title tags aren’t a search engine ranking factor, they do have an influence. Make sure that SEO basics, such as title tags, meta descriptions, and headings, aren’t holding back your rankings.
Have you optimized your homepage title and meta tags, and are they displayed correctly in the search results? Title tags that aren’t very unique can adversely affect the ranking of your page. While meta descriptions do not directly affect SEO, relevant, persuasive metas can improve the click-through rates. Get your title and meta tags customized within the head section of your site’s HTML.
Besides the information provided in the title tag, the main heading also lets your visitors know what is the primary purpose of the page. But when it is contained in an H1 tag, it becomes difficult for search bots to differentiate them from the rest of the content on the page.
Check Google Search Console
Google has always been clear as to what they expect from a website. Follow Google’s guidelines for greater search performance.
Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s service with which you can monitor, maintain and optimize your site’s visibility in search engines. Check GSC and see if there are any crawl errors messing up with the indexing or visibility of your site. Navigate to the Index Coverage report to see if there are any issues such as DNS errors, server errors, or URL errors. Be sure to check Enable Email Notifications so you’re quickly alerted of any big issues. Check in with Google Search Console on a regular basis.
Check Google Analytics
Google Analytics shows if there is a drop in traffic or user metrics like time on page, pages per session, or bounce rate. If you have made recent changes to your site content, design, or functionality, then reverting the changes can help traffic bounce back.
Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of information about how people can find your site, how you can find out how much time they spend on your time, and what triggers them to leave before making use of the call to action command.
Create Good Content
Duplicate and uninteresting content can have a major impact on your website’s rankings. Interacting with the visitors is also a good idea to keep them engaged. You might look at what your competitors are doing wrong and work on it.
If users aren’t spending time on a certain page, it indicates that the content isn’t connecting.
Make Sure Your Site has Good Speed
If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, know that you are behind the race already.
You can also find the Core Web Vitals report in the Google Search Console, to see metrics like Largest Contentful Paint and First Input Delay. Optimizations like leveraging browser caching, minifying code, optimizing images, and enabling resource compression can help take your website to the next level
Make it Mobile-Friendly
Google now is an almost entirely mobile-first, mobile-only venture. Not being able to provide a good mobile experience is totally unacceptable. Every element that functions on desktop doesn’t necessarily work on mobile and you may not want to miss out on leads with a slow or complicated website.
Run your site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if mobile compatibility could be affecting your rankings.
Check Keywords List
Tracking the wrong keywords can have an impact on your rankings. For instance, say you run a digital marketing agency and have stopped providing graphic designing services and have removed that page from your site. It is likely that you will still fall for keywords related to those services. So when you see a downward trend for the primary keywords that drive traffic, a thorough intervention is needed.
The right keywords are those that tick all the following boxes:
- Most highly searched by your target audience
- Most realistic to rank on page one
- Most likely to result in a conversion
The targeted keywords that made sense in the past, may not work very well today. So make sure to reevaluate periodically. If you aren’t proactively tracking your keywords, it can distract you from achieving true ranking success.
Ditch the keywords that won’t result in conversions, and instead, monitor high-value keywords that you can dominate with small on-page optimizations like creating new content or tweaking titles, meta tags etc.
Conclusion
If your site experiences a drop in rankings, small and simple optimizations can do the needful. By following the above mentioned tips you are likely to see desired results. If you’re still not achieving rankings, get in touch with us for an assessment.
