When the organic search rankings for your website or blog begins to drop, it can be a cause for concern. While it may be disconcerting and may have an immediate impact on your traffic, don’t panic just yet. There are steps that can be taken to identify the cause for the drop in rankings and to help restore your rankings.
The first step to take is to do some detective work. Analyze your website’s analytics to see where the decline in rankings began and which keywords were affected. If the decline in rankings is recent, it may be the result of a Google algorithm change or reindexing of content. In this case, you may simply need to wait a few days to see if your rankings bounce back. If not, consider how you can make changes to your website to improve its rankings.
Another factor that may be negatively impacting your rankings is the quality of your content. Low quality content won’t rank well and can even result in penalties from Google. To identify the content that may be the cause for the decline, you can use tools such as Google Search Console which shows keywords and pages with high impressions but low clicks. You can then focus on improving the quality of that content and optimizing it for the intended audience.
You may also want to look into the competition. Analyze their content to see where they are outperforming you and what strategies they are using that you are not. This can help you to identify gaps in your content and strategies to overcome them.
Finally, it is important to be patient with your efforts. Although there may be a noticeable decline in rankings, it may take some time for the strategies you are employing to take hold and for your rankings to increase again. Don’t make the mistake of scrapping efforts altogether and restarting from scratch, as this may result in even more lost time and resources.
When organic search rankings drop, it can be a cause for concern. However, there are steps that can be taken to identify the cause and to help restore them. Utilizing tools and resources such as SEO, analytics and competitive analysis to take the necessary steps to improve quality of content and optimize for the audience you are targeting can help improve search rankings over time.