10 Reasons Why Your Rankings Have Dropped
You have noticed that your leads and sales have stagnated. Checking the analytics reports, you find that your site’s SEO ranking has dropped. What could have caused this, you ask yourself? Here are 10 reasons why your rankings have dropped.
The nature of Google Searches
Google’s search nature is heavily impacted by a lot of factors. The search engine would most times optimise the search results based on the recent searches and online behaviour of the user. This fluctuation is just normal. What one could do is to make sure that your SEO team can adapt quickly to this natural change. SEO Services in Hobart ensures to give you a team and a set of approaches that can do just this.
Algorithms
Site rankings are also affected by Google’s different algorithms. Factors like user preferences, device, and location can drastically affect search results, which is evident when your two devices display different search results on the same keywords. This can sometimes cause search results to be extremely unhelpful towards websites or the complete opposite of some.
Incorrect Keyword Tracking
If you have been running your website for quite a few years now, you might be a victim of your practices. You might be using outdated keywords or keywords that are different from what customers use for your products and services. The nature of “natural speech” searches where people type (or speak) entire sentences and phrases rather than lone words is also something that you should be thinking about. Updating your keywords to include newer or less complicated ones can improve your site’s rankings.
Manual Action
Manual action refers to penalties made against your site. Google penalties can be caused by users that deem your site to be non-compliant with Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines. If your site ranking has only dropped on Google but not on other search engines like Yahoo, then it may be a sign that a manual action has been made against your site.
Link Quality
Link quality can affect your site’s rankings. Having numerous low-quality links on your site can cause your site to drop. Google can penalise you for this since low-quality sites can be used to exploit the algorithm or to generate spam. If your site has recently lost some good quality links, it could also cause Google to rank your site lower in searches. Ensure that you clean your site from low-quality links, and maintain good-quality ones.
New Site
Launching a new site can also cause your rankings to drop. This would only be temporary though. Your site can recover in about 1 to 2 months. To minimise the drop in your site’s rankings, make sure that a proper 301 redirect plan is in place when you launch.
Server Problems
If your server has problems, it can also cause your site’s organic traffic to drop. These problems can lead to a broken caching function or indexing problems. Monitoring server logs and errors can help mitigate damage when server problems arise.
Competition
Sometimes the problem isn’t the algorithm or the server, but just that your competition simply has done something better. In this case, studying what your competitor has done and applying an improved version of it can put your site’s rankings back up.
User Experience
The amount of time a user spends on your site can be one of the factors for Google’s algorithms. This can make Google rank your site lower if they exit your site just shortly after visiting.
Slow Pages
Having pages that take forever to load can put your site lower down in the site rankings. This is because of bad user experience and also because Google likes to keep fast and optimised sites on top of its search results.
Want to know more about site rankings? Approach a trusted company to help answer your queries, visit Tailored SEO to find digital marketing experts dedicated to ranking you online.
Richard is the owner and head of digital at Tailored SEO. He has worked in the digital marketing space for over 10 years and has worked with a wide range of clients.