If you're an integrated marketer who manages your search engine optimization, you know that there can be a lot of flux in your ranking - it can be seasonal, cyclical, or a million other things. But when your ranking stays too low for too long, it's time to pop the hood and look at what's up with your data.
Other than a dreaded algorithm change, these are the most common reasons for a drop and some potential fixes:
How much do you trust your data?The solution that all integrated marketers are hoping for is a case of wonky data rather than an actual drop. Start by making sure you're not missing data from any days, or that traffic from mobile has been excluded. Check with your engineers or hosting platform to see if they know of an issue.
You can also look at your organic traffic since that's the most reliable data you have on your site. If there's truly an issue with your ranking, you'll probably see a comparable drop in overall traffic.
To test if your data is the problem, check your analytics with Google Search console. If their numbers are markedly different from yours, the problem may simple be something amiss with your own data.
Is the drop consistent across all segments?Dust off your spreadsheets: you're crunching numbers and looking for trends. Start with a large enough sample to yield meaningful resorts. It may be helpful to compare year-over-year numbers, but a 12-week sample is enough to get you started.
- Look at your traffic across all devices (desktop, tablet, mobile), since this is one of the biggest causes of overall rankings drops. The actual culprit could be a site or a page that isn't properly optimized for mobile.
- Traffic drops may vary according to the type of page: look at traffic to product pages vs. blog posts vs. the homepage. Notice a difference?
If you find that either of these is responsible for your drop, you may need to redesign some pages. Stale content is also another easy ray to lose rank. Keeping web content fresh and relevant is favorable for Google's crawlers.
While you're at it...Google itself says that good content is one of the top three drivers of SEO. Even while you're analyzing the other factors, make sure your organization is still producing high-quality content. Think expertise, authority, and trust. Perform routine maintenance to keep your results irresistibly clickable. Before too long, those numbers should be moving in the right direction.
