Rankings drop is a dreadful situation for any online business or website. Every business needs traffic in order to make sales. Ranking high in search engines is a trusted way to gain traffic.
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7 Ways to Recover from Ranking Drop
So, a rankings drop can hurt you big time.
The first thing to consider when you find that you have lost your rankings is,
Blame yourself for the fault. Don’t try to stick your head out of the problem, saying that it happened because of your competitors or your haters.
This way, you could be very calm and composed while addressing this problem.
There can be, however, many causes for a rankings drop.
If you are the victim, consider these 7 important things, you should do as soon as you find out that your rankings have dropped,
1. Check the basics first.
It is always easy to jump directly to very complicated problems and underestimating the basic ones.
But, don’t panic and check the very basics of your site first.
See if your site is successfully responding to 200 status code or not.
A successfully running site would respond to the 200 series status code.
You can check it with the HTTP status code checker tool.
If your site is not responding to the 200 status code, then it must be responding with 404(page not found) or 410(page permanently removed).
You can then solve this problem and fix the issue.
Also consider checking what restrictions and permissions you have given to the robot.txt file on your server.
If the restrictions are too much and, you are curbing the web crawlers from crawling some of the main pages of your website,
Then this can be the problem. Consider giving more permission to the robot.txt file.
2. Check simple SEO practices.
Though simple SEO practices like, titles, meta descriptions and tags don’t have a great significance in your rankings,
They still contribute and can affect in your rankings drop.
Check for your homepage tags. See if you are using very generic ones.
Try using very focused and SEO optimised tags for which you could rank higher.
Also consider the checking the title of your site.
Does it contain SEO optimised keywords in it? If not, then consider adding some.
Also the titles should be in H1 format for the web crawlers to know that they are titles and not parts of the content itself.
This can also play a part in your rankings drop.
You can check this with SEO tools and you can render it.
Meta descriptions are also important to consider as, they also contribute in your rankings.
Check if they are apt and describe your site perfectly.
3. Stay alert on google’s algorithm updates.
Google’s algorithms are updated in real time.
Algorithm updates can also cause a tweak in your rankings and your rankings can drop.
Always keep an eye out for news and trending topics about google and its algorithms.
Follow webmasters on social media to stay up to date with latest news.
If you see webmasters panicking and talking about updates in the algorithm,
Then this can be a possible reason for your rankings drop.
If you are doing everything right, and you are confident that there is nothing that can cause your site’s rankings drop,
Then algorithm updates won’t hurt you as, you’ll be back on track one’s the update settles down.
4. Keep an eye on the Google search console.
Google search console is an awesome tool which will tell you exactly what google needs from your website and how you can achieve it.
It will tell you all the errors and faults your site is having which is affecting your search engine rankings.
Stay updated with google search console to know get regular feedbacks about your site.
You can turn on email notifications for bigger threats and you’ll be notified via email, as soon as the search console finds a big error on your site.
You can then fix it and be on track.
Also, try doing advanced search for errors in the search console.
See for crawl errors which are stopping crawlers to crawl on your website.
Fix them immediately to stay away from rankings drop.
5. Check for Google analytics.
Google analytics is a gold mine of information about your website.
You can know the real time user experience from page views to actions to bounce rates.
You can from where people are finding your site and what actions they are taking on it.
You can also know what the bounce rate of your website is.
With this core analyses of your site, you can easily pin-point the faulty areas.
And then, you can render them to avoid your site form falling in the pit of rankings drop!
6. Check the heart of your site. Your content.
‘Content is king’. Without quality content, your site is similar to a shop with no goods to sell!
Check whether your content is interesting and informative.
Your content should be catchy and make the users read with delight.
The users should find value through your content.
You can evaluate this yourself by reading your own content.
See after reading the first paragraph that, whether it pushes you to read the second one or not.
You’ll come to know exactly what you are missing out with your content.
Other than this, also check whether your content is original or not.
Copied content is an assured way to loose your rankings.
Users don’t like to read content which is already present.
They want something new and totally different to amaze them.
You can be easily penalised for plagiarised content.
Check your content for plagiarism and change it if you find its plagiarised.
Also, keep your content up to date and make possible changes time to time.
7. Check you site’s loading speed.
Your site’s loading speed can also be a very contributing factor in your rankings drop.
If your site is taking more than the desired 3 seconds of time in loading,
Then the bounce rate is surely to increase.
Fast loading sites can perform great in the search engines and are very less vulnerable to rankings drop.
You can optimise images and and other complex content in your website to increase your site’s loading time.
Conclusion:
Rankings drop is indeed a very terrible situation and can cause lots of problems for a business or a website.
But, with these 7 simple optimisations, you can render the errors and get your site back on track almost instantly.
7 Ways to Recover from Ranking Drop
- 7 Important Things to Consider to Recover From Rankings Drop - November 30, 2018