How to Recover your SEO When your Rankings Dropped?

by Carson
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Causes of ranking drops

We won’t always land on the first place on search engines, so ranking drops are inevitable. However, there are some methods to regain control of your SEO from the condition. If you’re concerned about falls in rankings (which you should do), please read the tips below to repossess the presents of your hard work.

The Map

Let’s go into the topic now.

It’s Seasonal

Firstly, remember that smaller drops are likely to be seasonal. That means, it will come back again in a short time and repeat the process periodically. For instance, if your blog is plainly about science, expect to lose a bit of traffic during Christmas. However, getting into the trends and choose breakout search queries can help.

Talking about rankings, temporary changes of search intent can decline that. Just remember to review your articles and ensure it’ll match the usual intention.

Competition

But, even if you’ve optimized all things correctly, you may still get rankings like “100”, “90”, etc. Unfortunately, no one will click on that because the results before are already answered the question.

Also, if you’re relying on a highly competitive keyword like “SEO”, the results will be dominated by authoritative and famous sites. You basically have no way to compete with these sites that has millions of backlinks.

The #1-3 results for “SEO” on Google

Thus, target for long-tail keywords at first. Although it does not bring much search traffic, it helps improve your rankings. You may be ranking #85 on “How to Improve your SEO”, but #1 for a very specific term.

The difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords — Long-tail ones are much easier to rank
Image Credit: Canva
Follow Your Competitors

If you’ve noticed some competitors comparable with your level, follow their actions to look at their techniques. Even though the website may currently rank lower than yours, you will not know when they’ll overtake you.

Thus, keep an eye on their writing quality, social media activities, and link-building strategies. If they’re proven to be beneficial to your rankings, try to implement them on your site and look for improvements.

Even better, you can use your competitors’ ideas for inspiration, and create your own based on them. Also, check for websites in your niche that are already using them. If you can’t name a few, you’re good to go because your methods are probably unique.

Ranking drops are often due to lost links. It’s because backlinks are one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithms. So, see if the dropped pages recently lost some precious links.

If so, try to find broken links from other websites, and try to get them through email. Or, analyze the linking website’s content and see if the lost link made them better. However, if the page is already ranking very high, just let the link disappear until the CTR dropped dramatically.

Why let those links go away? Well, if you use too much email outreach and/or your emails are to forceful and looks like you’re firmly requesting for a link, the associated webpage may be penalized.

Therefore, deal with email outreach carefully and follow the link-building tactics from experts. Otherwise, gain links naturally from other ways to improve your search appearance.

An Algorithm Change

According to a Moz.com survey, Google sets little tweaks on its algorithm a few times every day. That’s because of the emergence of new content and black-hat SEO strategies, and their systems are constantly trying to get the search engine back on track upon detection of something unusual.

More often than not, a modification of a search algorithm won’t affect your rankings. In fact, you will see it gradually increasing if you’ve done all SEO tips right. So, if your rankings dropped dramatically after a major update (or even a tiny correction), you may be engaging in some black-hat SEO techniques.

If so, inspect the harmed pages and update them. Try to make the essay as normal and fluent as possible, and check for technical issues.

Search engine algorithm changes
Algorithm changes can benefit white-hat SEO and harm black-hat SEO
Image Credit: Canva

Search Engine Penalties or Unnatural Methods

“Be wary of an expert that gives unrealistic guarantees of ranking first on Google. No one can guarantee that. And often those who try to guarantee that do so by engaging in practices against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines like creating unnatural linking and doorway sites. This could result in your pages or website being permanently removed from Google’s results if there are particularly strong violations.”

(Google Search Central, 2020)
The source of the quote above

The quote above is a warning for people who use unnatural methods to attempt to improve their rankings.

Remember that web crawlers can scan the page’s content to understand what the page is about. At the same time, it can detect violations and errors too. Search engines are used for returning the best content. If a lot of spam appears in the search results, it will only toss users to another search engine.

Therefore, do NOT attempt to hide text or links, stuff the page with keywords, or create phishing pages.

Moreover, redirect the users to the intended destination, and make unique essays.

To learn more about what rules should you follow, please visit the website for Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Keep in mind that getting your site penalized even once will have negative, long-term effects to your rankings.

Examples of violations of webmaster guidelines
Image Credit: Canva

Technical Issues

If you think it’s not an on-page problem, consider thinking about technical issues. Things like mobile usability and site speed can significantly affect your rankings.

Site Speed

Nowadays, we really hate waiting. In fact, according to an article from hostingmanual.net, just above half of all visitors leave the page if it takes 3 seconds to load. What’s more, 80% of users who experienced that never visited that website again. (hostingmanual.net, 2020).

Google also had its own study for page speed. They found out that when the loading speed increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate skyrockets by 32%. (Daniel An, 2018).

So, you really have to improve your speed, no matter how fast your webpages are.

How page speed affects the bounce rate and basic tips to make your webpage faster
Image Credit: Canva
Speed Metrics

To enhance your overall performance, you have at least a few metrics to deal with:

  1. TTFB (Time to First Byte)
  2. FCP (First Contentful Paint)
  3. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
  4. Time to Interactive

etc.

Here are some tips to make your page faster with these statistics.

You have to purchase for hosting in a blazing-fast server to quickly respond to the client’s request. Also, you can upgrade your server’s CPU and RAM to handle requests more quickly.

You can eliminate render-blocking resources by inlining critical scripts and stylesheets and defering non-essential files. Minify all your files to erase most whitespaces. This could make the browser render the page faster and make visitors feel that the site is loading.

Furthermore, optimize and compress your images to make them load more quickly. Use “preload” and “dns-prefetch” to load non-critical resources fast.

Mobile Usability

Google is implementing mobile-first indexing recently. That means, crawlers will be viewing your page from a phone’s perspective, not from a PC. According to Backlinko.com, 58% of all Google searches are done on mobile.

Therefore, optimizing your website for smartphones is really essential. Try to make all content on a webpage visible to mobile users. Don’t make it too wide to view.

Moreover, optimize your font size. Try to make it easy-to-read, no matter what devices are browsing the site. Furthermore, the “clickable elements”, for example, links and interactives, should not be too close together. Users may have clicked on another element and see unexpected changes or pages on a touchscreen phone.

The importance of mobile-friendliness
The importance of mobile-friendliness
Image Credit: Canva
Crawling Problems

If you see a sudden drop in organic traffic, consider thinking about crawling problems. If search engines can’t crawl your page, it won’t be able to rank because they don’t know the webpage exists at all.

The simplest method to test that is to search for site:yourdomain.com. If any search results didn’t appear, tell search engines to crawl your website immediately. Moreover, you may be missing a robots.txt or a sitemap.xml file. Create one if you think that’s the problem.

Furthermore, link internally and publish regularly. They can help the spiders (web crawlers) find your new content once it’s uploaded. Ensure that all your pages you want to index have the following <meta> tags:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="index, follow">
<meta name="bingbot" content="index, follow">

Changes in Metrics

If your rankings dropped, check your metrics on search.google.com/search-console and analytics.google.com. See if the bounce rate has risen and the click-through rate (CTR) has fallen. If so, try to make better headlines and content to enhance your user experience and search appearance.

Note: An excessively low bounce rate (e.g., 5% or 8%) may indicate duplicate tracking code, which is a severe technical problem on your website.

Moreover, check your referrals despite the rankings have dropped. For instance, see if your social followers’ count and your direct traffic modify. These statistics can also affect what you’ll do, from increasing your writing quality to just wait for a while.

Outdated or Duplicate Content

Don’t see your reasons for an SEO drop? You might have outdated or duplicate content. Outdated ones, especially scientific and news articles, are updated so quickly that the ones from 2008 are probably not as trustworthy as those from 2020.

Additionally, duplicate content on your website competes with each other, hurting their probabilities of ranking. The only solutions are:

  • Use a <link rel=”canonical href=”YOUR_URL”> tag
  • Combine those pages into one
  • Issue 301 redirects (on the site level AND when you finish combining the articles)

These will make search engines understand that the duplicate pages are legitimate or have already combined or disappeared. Therefore, the actions could hopefully boost a bit of rankings. Still, it’s better to cover the topic in-depth in one article.

Conclusion

Here are some tips that can get your rankings and SEO efforts back if your rankings dropped. Remember that most of them are seasonal if you’ve done white-hat SEO appropriately and consistently. If the procedures above didn’t help, check out more in the references.

Moreover, if you want more tips, you can view our SEO guide which contains conclusive procedures of improving your rankings. Stay tuned.

References and Credits

  1. (n.d.). Here’s What You Should Do When Your Search Rankings Drop. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/search-rankings-just-dropped/
  2. (2020, July 28). 9 Reasons Google Rankings Suddenly Dropped: Recovery Guide. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.link-assistant.com/news/reasons-your-rankings-dropped.html
  3. Masha Maksimava. (2019, May 20). Seven reasons why your rankings dropped and how to fix them. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/20/seven-reasons-why-your-rankings-dropped-and-how-to-fix-them/
  4. David Trounce. (2018, August 23). 20 Reasons Why Your Search Ranking & Traffic Might Drop. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-search-rankings-traffic-drop/264617/
  5. (n.d.). SEO – Google Search. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.google.com/search?q=SEO
  6. (2019, November 12). 5 reasons your content won’t rank – even though it’s optimized • Yoast. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://yoast.com/reasons-optimized-content-doesnt-rank/
  7. (n.d.). Broken Link Building: The Complete Guide – Backlinko. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/broken-link-building
  8. Dr. Peter J. Meyers. (2019, May 14). How Often Does Google Update Its Algorithm? – Moz. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://moz.com/blog/how-often-does-google-update-its-algorithm
  9. Google Search Central. (2020, February 26). Tips for hiring an SEO specialist | Search for Beginners Ep 9 – YouTube. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWsyr-D06Ck
  10. (2020, February 4). 3 Seconds: How Website Speed Impacts Visitors and Sales. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.hostingmanual.net/3-seconds-how-website-speed-impacts-visitors-sales/
  11. Daniel An. (2018, February). Mobile conversion rate statistics – Think with Google. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data-collections/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/
  12. (2019, October 4). Reduce server response times (TTFB) – Web.dev. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://web.dev/time-to-first-byte/
  13. Salman Ravoof. (2020, April 21). 10 Proven Ways To Improve First Contentful … – WP Rocket. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https://wp-rocket.me/blog/improving-first-contentful-paint/
  14. (n.d.). Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide – Backlinko. Retrieved January 4, 2021, from https://backlinko.com/mobile-seo-guide
  15. (n.d.). Mobile Usability report – Search Console HelpGoogle Support. Retrieved January 4, 2021, from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9063469?hl=en
  16. (n.d.). https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js. Retrieved January 4, 2021, from https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js

Image Credit: Google (search results), PageSpeed Insights (speed report), Canva

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