Where you rank on search engines like Google can have a major impact on the traffic your website gets, and the brand exposure you receive as a result. So when your rankings goes down, the effects on your marketing success can be drastic.
Sometimes, especially small businesses can feel powerless facing the prospect of low search rankings. But in fact, much of what happens is under your control. If you understand why your search rankings have dropped, you can do something about it.
Why have my Search Rankings Dropped?
Well… Here are 5 Reasons for Lower Search Rankings
Are you finding yourself in a situation where your rankings drop suddenly or over time? Here are 5 reasons that may have happened:
- A Lack of Strategic SEO.
If you’re not strategic about your search engine optimisation efforts, your website is more vulnerable to drops in rankings. Especially small business SEO can easily suffer from this problem, to which the only solution is a more strategic approach: find the keywords your audience uses, and your entire website for them.
optimise - No Mobile optimisation.
Mobile-friendly web design is becoming increasingly crucial in SEO. Last year, a major Google algorithm update ensured that your rankings will suffer if your website is not equally accessible and user-friendly on any screen size. - Low-Quality Links.
The more links your site gets, the more credible search engines find it to be. But the reality is not always that simple. If other sites that search engines consider to have low credibility link to you, your ranking may be penalised. Regularly disavowing these bad backlinks is a crucial step to SEO success. - Bad Website Hosting.
Frequent down times or slow load times can also hurt your search engine optimisation. If your drop in ranking coincided with moving to a new hosting server, you may have found the culprit. Make sure that your web host prioritises high-quality, reliable speeds as much as you do. - Not Accounting for Google Updates.
Search engines like Google continuously update their algorithms to make sure their rankings remain credible, relevant, and authentic. If you don’t pay attention to these updates, a formerly perfectly fine website may suddenly suffer negative consequences.
Of course, these are only the most common reasons for dropping rankings. Your competitors may have improved their search optimisation efforts to move ahead of you, or your content may become outdated. Either way, when your rankings drop, you have to do something about it.
How to Get Your SEO Back Up
The first thing you should do is to engage in a thorough SEO audit of your site. This process enables you to find the potential culprits for your dropping rankings and is the first step to doing something about it.
Once you’ve found the reason(s) for the drop, it’s time to take action. An SEO strategy, better keyword research, and new mobile optimisation can all be factors in addressing the problem.
Sometimes, though, the solution can be simple. Effective and strategic content marketing for example, can ensure a more SEO-focused approach, while simultaneously ensuring that your content will always remain fresh.
Finally, be sure to work with professionals to improve your search engine optimisation. Some of the potential root problems, like low quality links, bad web hosting, or mobile optimisation, can only be accomplished by web design experts who know exactly how to address the issue and work strategically for a fix.
Dropping search rankings are never a positive. Rankings on the first page of Google, for example, receive 90% of all traffic for a given search result.
So when you see your rankings drop, you need to do something about it. Contact us today to take the first step toward getting your rankings back to where they need to be.
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