Experiencing a Google ranking drop can hurt your online visibility. Common causes include recent website changes, technical issues, algorithm updates, and competitor actions. To address the drop, verify the issue, audit your site, check for technical problems, and review any recent changes. Also, look for manual penalties and be mindful of negative SEO tactics. Lets jump in;
Before jumping to the solution to how to fix your site after ranking drops, let's look at the reasons why your Google ranking drops dynamically. Here are some possible causes that could cause a drop in your Google website ranking:
1. The first reason can be any small or bulk changes to your website content, restructuring, redesigning, migration, or adding pages can lead to ranking drops.
2. Technical issues on the search engine’s side or problems with your website’s crawlability and indexing can also affect ranking drop in the search engine.
3. Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc frequently update their algorithms, which can also impact your website and can be the reason for a ranking drop.
4. Google might change its understanding of search intent, affecting the relevance and ranking of websites.
5. Search engine ranking may drop when the competitor improves their website to climb jumper
6. Loss of backlinks, a crucial ranking factor in SEO, can also significantly impact your website’s Google ranking and ranking drops.
Steps to solve and fix ranking drops
Here are steps to help Improve Your SERP Rankings on Google:
Before you jump to the conclusion that your website ranking has dropped, first check whether it’s truly the ranking that has dropped or if your ranking tracker is showing incorrect information. Sometimes, ranking trackers may produce faulty results due to technical issues.
You can cross-check by searching directly in search engines to see where your website ranks. This will help you understand the reality of whether your ranking has actually dropped or not.
It is important to do a thorough analysis of the situation in order to determine the reason for a decline in your Google rankings.
To figure out the extent of the drop, start by utilizing web analytics data, Google Search Console, and your SEO rank tracking tool. Investigate the decline's cause by looking at the search terms and sites that are impacted.
One common reason for a drop in Google rankings is making small or extensive changes to your website. If you've made any recent changes to your website and its Google ranks have dropped dramatically since then, it's likely that those adjustments are to blame. These could include any changes to your website's content, appearance, or structure.
If you are unaware of any major changes to your website but have noticed a drop in ranks, you can contact your SEO or Digital Marketing agencies to see if any adjustments have been made. You can also review your project management software for any activity that could have caused the ranking to decline.
Changes can be technical, such as alterations to your website’s HTTP code, canonical URLs, metadata, Hreflang definitions, etc. Adjustments to the website’s internal link structure and content can also affect its search engine rankings.
Technical issues can significantly impact your site's rankings, so it's crucial to review and address any potential problems. Ensure your site loads quickly on all devices, using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test and improve load times. With the increasing number of mobile users, having a mobile-friendly site is essential, so check how your site performs on mobile devices. Additionally, make sure your site is being correctly indexed and crawled by Google by checking your robots.txt file and ensuring critical pages are not blocked.
If you've noticed a sudden drop in your website's Google rankings, one critical step is to check if your site has received a manual penalty from Google. Manual penalties, also known as manual actions, are issued by Google's human reviewers when they find that your site violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Take a look at the Negative SEO Tactics:
Removing good-quality links.