Why Your SEO Ranks Drop – And what to do about it

If you’ve been running your company website for a little while now, you may have already experienced a time of SEO success. However, just because your website ranked highly at one time, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be SERP successful forever. Fluctuations in your SEO rankings aren’t a huge problem – the issue only becomes more complicated when you don’t understand why those fluctuations are taking place. If you’ve recently noticed that your rankings have begun to go down, it’s important to figure out what went wrong, and more importantly, how you’re going to fix the issue to get your leads flowing again.

1. Make Sure Your Links are High Quality

A lot of companies made the damaging mistake a few years back, of purchasing thousands of backlinks for their website at low, bulk-prices. Now, however, the new updates that have been made to search engine algorithms to stop “search engine spamming” has seen a number of websites drop in the rankings or disappear completely. If you have unnatural links plaguing your website, then you should do everything you can to get rid of them as quickly as possible, as Google will penalize your company for trying to cheat its way to the top of the rankings.

1. Bad Hosting

If your company recently switched to a low-quality hosting service or a service with a data center that isn’t ideal for offering users fast-loading pages, then you’re going to end up with behavior on your website convincing search engines to rank you lower on their results pages. The solution to this is to ensure that your website visitors have a quick and pleasurable experience on your website. Ensure that you have a great host – preferably one that is close to your local visitors, and don’t be too cheap to pay for your website to be placed on a server without 6,000 other sites.

1. Incorrect robots.txt files

Making a small mistake in the robots.txt file of the blog or website that you own can be enough to tell search engines that your pages should be completely ignored. A simple mistake is all that it takes to dry up your traffic almost completely. Make sure that you are always as cautious as possible with your robots.txt file, and double-check for typos. If you’re not sure about your skills, get a professional to deal with this aspect of your website for you.

1. Stay ahead of your Competitors

Unfortunately, Search engine rankings can be seen as a zero-sum game. For a keyword, if you’re the ranking of your competitor’s website improves, then at least one other website ranking is going to have to go down. This is one of the reasons why SEO and content services are an on-going concept, rather than a one-time deal. Your website will never be completely optimized because your competitors will always be researching and improving their pages. It’s an eternal game of king of the hill, and the only way to win is with a continuous effort.

1. Check for Google Updates

Thousands of technological geniuses are employed at Google for the strict purpose of improving their search algorithm. Because of this, that algorithm gets updated literally hundreds of times every year. Some of those updates are huge and disruptive, whereas others are soft and subtle – barely noticeable to most companies. The larger updates are the ones that receive an animal-theme, such as Panda, Penguin or Hummingbird. If you want to avoid search-ranking death through Google updates, make sure that you engage in only white-hat SEO tactics, and stay up to date with the latest rules.