8 Ways To Handle Drops In Search Engine Rankings

As someone who has been involved in the Internet industry since 2001, I can tell you that no ranking in safe when it comes to Google. You can be the #1 site for a term one day only to find yourself out of the top 30 the very next day. If you have taken time to diversify your traffic sources, you won’t panic when such thing happens to you. But pure SEO businesses can suffer if they lose their rankings. Making rash decisions is not going to help you if you are experiencing issues with your Google rankings. The best way to deal with it is by approaching it step by step:

1. Don’t Panic + Monitor: do not panic. Google changes things around from time to time. Your ranking may drop for a week and then go right back to where it was. You don’t want to go insane and make lots of changes the very minute your ranking drops.
2. Go through changes you may have made: we all make minor changes to our websites on a consistent basis. If you have changed your .htaccess or  robots.txt, you may want to go through those changes to figure out what you may done wrong. Sometimes, adding a wrong line could lead to major issues for your website.
3. Refer to your stats: it’s often tough to figure out when your ranking has dropped unless you have installed an analytics package on your website. Going through your analytics data could give you ideas what may have happened to your website.
4. Check with your web host: websites get hacked left and right all the time. It could be that your web host has been experiencing downtime on a consistent basis. Whichever the case, you should take time to find out.
5. Check market trends: has something happened to your industry or niche recently? If you have been paying attention, you probably haven’t missed it. If your market is becoming more competitive, it’s only normal to see many more competitors in it. Not everyone is going to stay on the first page when there are too many sites going for it.
6. Check out your competitors: going back to the previous point, you should always check to see who’s replaced you in the rankings. Going through their sites and analyzing their strengths should give you ideas.
7. Go back to basics: just because you have experienced a drop in the rankings does not mean that you should take drastic measures. Links and good content still matter.
8. Diversify your traffic sources: relying on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for your traffic is too risky. That’s why you should focus on multiple sources to drive traffic to your website. Twitter, StumbleUpon, and PPC ads can all help you make up your lost traffic.

These 8 steps will not guarantee you’ll get your rankings back. Nevertheless, you don’t want to lose it after every drop in your rankings.