Have you experienced sudden drops in your search engine rankings? Sudden drops in website traffic or performance can be concerning, especially if they significantly impact the organic traffic you see on your website. As your website is the core element of any good digital marketing strategy, it is essential to know the potential culprits and how to fix, identify and prevent any issues that may cause these drops!
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Was Your Website Broken By an Update or Change You’ve Made?
Regular updates to content on your website can benefit your organic rankings and keep them strong, but this can be a double-edged sword. If you are noticing drops in these rankings from any updates you’ve made, there may be an issue with the changes you’ve implemented!
Common causes for drops in rankings after website & SEO content changes can be:
Major Redesign of Your Site
If you’ve recently made major changes across your site that completely change the content away from keywords or structures you normally use, you may have confused the search engine algorithm. The results can be a sudden drop in your search engine rankings. Always ensure you’re performing changes with SEO content best practices in mind.
Domain and URL Changes
Changing your domain will massively affect your search engine rankings, as you will have lost the “trust” you have built from having a long-established history on the internet. Similarly to this, changing a page URL away from its original can cause rankings to drop if a redirect was not set up. Ensure you have set 301 redirects up on pages and changed domains is the best way to mitigate any dips in your rankings.
Lack of HTTPS or Security Certificate
If your website lacks the basic security for a site and is unsecured (HTTP), your site may be flagged as unsafe to visit, leading to a drop in your rankings.
Have You Checked for Any Potential Indexing Issues?
Indexing issues following can significantly impact a website’s rankings by preventing search engines from properly understanding or displaying its content in search results. We recommend using Google Search Console to identify any potential search engine indexing issues that may be negatively impacting the SEO content of the site and in turn your search engine rankings. Indexing issues can range from a long list of problems with the page with errors such as broken links leading tot 404, redirect chains, dynamic URLs or duplicate URLs to name a few!
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Has Your Website Been Penalised By Search Engines?
Any malware or phishing attacks that have gone unresolved on your website can result in a blacklisting from major search engines. Always ensure security protocol is in place and regularly monitored. Following improper SEO content best practices can also result in your site being penalised by search engines and in turn losing or dropping in rankings you may have previously had.
If a manual penalisation has been issued against your website by google, you will need to resolve the issue, then send an appeal via Google Search Console to start ranking again. Common examples of poor SEO practises include:
Keyword Stuffing
This is where you overload metadata, on-page content and alt text with too many keywords that read unnaturally and break the flow of content. This leads to your web pages being penalised and having the opposite effect of what’s intended. Ensure you are integrating keywords naturally and in moderation across the website.
Buying Backlinks
If you have paid money to have other websites link to yours, this is against most search engine terms of service and will result in a penalisation until you disavow those backlinks in Google Search Console.
Over-optimisation
Similar to keyword stuffing, over-optimising a site with unnecessary redirects or excessive focus on SEO content instead of natural, genuine, and unique content will negatively impact your search rankings. Search engines are smarter than you think, and their algorithms can identify when a website is manipulating search engine rankings.
Review Your Past SEO Content Strategy and The Latest Search Engine Updates
Lastly, it is important to review the SEO Strategy that you have implemented in the past as well as ensure your site is following the latest search engine updates and trends to make sure you are maximising your business’s reach and structuring your search engine practises to favour the algorithms in place!
