The dreaded thing has happened and your hard won top rankings in the Google search results have started to drop.
Whatever you do don’t let panic set in – you need to think logically and follow a systematic process to identify and then rectify the problem.
Here is an SEO Checklist from Ditto Digital, an SEO agency providing bespoke SEO consultant services for SMEs in the United Kingdom. Follow each step and you should soon start to see those rankings rise again:
- Check with your web developers to see if they have made any changes on the website recently. Even seemingly small changes like changing the title tag on an important page can have a major impact on rankings and organic traffic to the website. Or maybe there have been changes to the robots.txt file that are preventing all pages on the site being crawled by the search engines.
- Open up your Google Analytics account to see if the drop in rankings has resulted in a drop in visits across the whole website or just for certain pages. First open the Acquisitionmenu item on the right-hand side of the page and select data for the past 30 days. Select All Traffic and then Channels to identify the day when visits starting falling. Then select Search Console and Landing Pages from the menu and check individual page data.
- It’s also worth checking whether the drop in ranking is across all devices or specifically on desktop or mobile devices. Because issues such as speed and user experience can disproportionately affect mobile devices since their screens are smaller and their internet connections often slower it is common to see mobile rankings fall when desktop rankings remain stable. Use a software tool such as SEO PowerSuite’s Rank Trackerto check if the drop is across all devices.
- Now login to Google Search Console to check for any performance, indexing, mobile usability or Core Web Vitals issues. Search Console is a mine of useful information regarding technical issues on a website that can directly impact organic search rankings. It is a good idea to get into the habit of checking it regularly for any issues. And businesses will certainly want to make sure that no reported errors remain a problem for too long. It is also possible to set up email alerts to highlight any new issues if Google raise the bar by updating their algorithm.
- Finally, open up your website and browse through it manually on both a desktop and mobile device. Does everything look how you expect? Do pages render properly and do images load in a timely fashion? Ranking falls can often be the result of behind the scenes changes (for example an upgrade to a higher version of WordPress, updates to plugins or an automatic upgrade of the PHP version in use). If the website does not appear to be working as normal then contact our web developer straight away.
If the above checks fail to reveal the source of any problems it could also be that your competitors have started putting more time and effort into their SEO activities. If this might be the case then you will need to complete an SEO audit for your main competitors and compare the results with the audit results for your own website.
Remember, a logical, systematic process will usually reveal the source of the problem.
