Are you wondering why your website suddenly dropped its ranking on SERPs? Who do you intend to blame for it? Wait, you could be innocent or guilty.
Before you take any step, you should understand what causes pages to lose their ranking. By identifying the problem, you can easily resolve the problem and restore the rankings of your pages.
Quick action is necessary when addressing ranking on search pages. If you delay in addressing your issues, you may lose your position and it would take you long to get back to the top, another job that you will have to do from scratch.
This post will help you discover the problems you could encounter and the necessary steps to bring your site rankings back to the top.
1. New Google Ranking Algorithm
This could not be your fault. Google consistently updates the policies that they follow when ranking any website on their search results.
The policies are mostly referred to as the ranking algorithm. Occasionally, Google updates how they think pages should rank.
More content and relevance play a major role in ranking pages, but they are not the only things that Google uses for ranking.
The latest update, for example, has seen lots of changes to the rankings. Although some sites may see some boost in their rankings, others record a drop with every new update rollout.
Google advises that you keep updating with high-quality content because their algorithms are meant to deliver the best results for content searchers.
After each update, you should wait for Google to finish their rollout (takes somewhere close to two weeks) before you decide on updating your sites.
2. You Are Ranking The Wrong Keywords
Search engines and people who use the internet are changing the way they find content online. In the former days, the main keywords were product descriptions.
Today, people are searching for solutions. Focusing on product descriptive keywords may impact your ranking And you may be missing to measure the real results and traffic.
Taking the current coronavirus situation, people are more interested in ways to stay safe and avoid infections. When promoting your product, you should consider placing it in the needs of the customer.
It is less likely for people to want to know how facemasks filter elements in the air, but they may be interested in how they will protect them.
Therefore, you will discover that mask numbers won’t matter to consumers, and your ranking may bring little traffic.
3. Lost Or Bad Links
Creating links to your website helps people to find relevant information and products when reading other blogs. Google will tell you that links do not have a direct impact on SEO.
The moment you make a mistake is when you will realize that links are very important for ranking your business. High-quality backlinks can help you boost your ranking.
Your content is important, and that is why authority websites will link to you – that is how search engines treat links. Losing these types of links can lower your ranking on Google.
However, not every link is important. Search engines will penalize any links from spam or blacklisted websites.
Various SEO apps and services (like Ahrefs) can help you identify poor-quality links so that you can get rid of them.
To preserve or improve your ranking, focus on white label link building. Ensure that the links land on informative pages with the solutions customers seek.
4. Your Internal Links Are Broken
Did you redesign your website or move it to a new platform recently? That could be the reason why you lost the ranking.
Crawlers always locate content according to your link structure. That is what the sitemap does, though it is not mandatory to have one.
Search engine bots can follow your website’s links to retrieve all the URLs to the pages you allow indexing on your site.
When you redesign or move a website, the website URL structure may change. For example, various CMS structure the links differently. Or, if you modify the structure through your site admin dashboard. That can break how things work with search engines.
When bots try to access the URLs that contain the content and find that they no longer exist, they drop the listing and assume that your website doesn’t exist.
Broken internal links also mean poor user experience, which is another factor that search engines use to determine if your web pages are worth ranking on the top results.
It can also happen that during your migration, your new links and old ones reflect the same content. That could make Google penalize you for publishing duplicates.
You should fix all the duplicates as soon as possible. If possible, retain the old ranked URL structure. If not, use a 301 redirect rule to forward old links to new pages so that they retain the ranking.
The 301 rule tells search engines that the documents moved permanently to a new location and redirect website visitors as well.
5. Your Content Became “OLD”
Google does not have to detect a problem with your website to drop your ranking in favor of other sites.
While the search engine tries to keep the most relevant information on the top of their SERPs, they also prefer the most recent content.
New content is regarded as more reliable because of the latest statistics, trends, and research.
Newer content can get a higher ranking when people search for the same keyword string consistently. The content you published last year could lose its ranking because Google deems it old.
For the best results, keep updating your content. Find relevant information to update your old posts so that they reflect the latest facts.
You do not have to create new posts because Google can detect any updates to your content and give you due credit.
6. Your Website Or Server Is Slow
If you are using a shared web hosting service, you are sharing the same resources on the same physical and virtual computer system.
A problem with one website can hold the whole server down and cause all hosted websites to go down. At times, the sites can load slowly because of server overload, which restricts the number of concurrent requests.
Websites can also become slow as you keep updating them with new content and designs. More images, files, and scripts mean that there are more requests before the pages can load completely.
When Google finds out that your site takes too long to load or fails to load, it will penalize you for poor user experience.
If you are on a shared host, and you love your business, it is time to get a dedicated or virtual private server. Using a CDN to serve your content also makes it easy for people to access your site and avoid slow servers.
You can also use content caching and compression to make your website faster. Fast-loading sites get favored on Google SERPs.
Summing Up
Every time, there are many new web pages published online. Everyone is trying to get their content ranked on search engines. The search bots and employees are also working hard to ensure that only relevant and up-to-date content gets priority on SERPs.
You should audit your site and rankings frequently to avoid any mistakes that could drop your position. Protect your ranking to protect your business.
