When your organic traffic suddenly drops. What do you do? And How do you fix it? Here’s our top list of things to keep an eye on when organic traffic plummets.
How Do You Know What Caused The Problem?
First, check if you dropped in rank in more than one search. Conduct a search for your business or brand on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You should know where you rank in each. If you dropped in every SERP, you know it has no bearing on any search engine’s algorithm. If it were an algorithm problem, it would only affect that search engine’s ranking.
Consider Your Digital Content
When you find out that the problem occurs on every search engine, look to your webpage’s contents as the culprit. Did you overburden it with too many keywords? The search engines might consider it keyword-stuffed or spammy. Are you promoting links on the webpage the search engines could consider spam or fraud? Either situation can cause your otherwise high-quality content to fail you.
Does your website or webpage use a lot of direct quotes? Even if you link to the original page that carried the quote, search engines may recognize this as plagiarism. When your website gets hit with a “plag flag” as marketing and journalism refer to it, it drops in the SERP.
The solution to this also involves updating the website. You need to rewrite each direct quote as an indirect quote so your website features an original text. You still need to link to the original source of the quote.
Only One Search Engine Rank Dropped
Sometimes, the drop in your organic traffic only occurs on one search engine. Let’s pick on Google since it notoriously updates its algorithms more often than most people change their socks. You may only need to change something small, such as the webpage titles, or you may need to add to the webpages as web developers had to a few years ago when the algorithms began prioritizing metadata.
It could also be a problem with your tracker. Check your tracking code and the search engine’s tracking page. Also, check any associated plug-ins. Once you update the tracking code or the plug-in or both, your problem should rectify itself. If the tracking code fails, the search engine doesn’t receive data to rank your site.
You Dropped in Every Search Engine
Your content looks great and ranks highly in various SEO writing programs. You only cover relevant topics on your blog, and your landing pages sell your products in a subtle way. Yet your rank plummeted. This conundrum could mean that you lost valuable backlinks.
How do you know? The quickest way to determine this uses a third-party tool. These link counters track old versions of your website mentions and current ones to determine if you lost links. The Internet constantly gets spidered by search engine robots. Link counters look at this historical data and compare it to what’s out there at the moment you use them. If you lost backlinks, the tool tells you.
The solution to this problem involves contacting each website that once linked to your site. You very nicely explain what happened and why you would appreciate it if they would link to you once again. You’ll probably have an easier time getting a yes from them if you already link to their website. Mutual backlinks between two high-quality websites help both sites rank better.
Your Website Re-design Did You In
Perhaps you underwent a website design recently. Your new site looks fantastic! Something went wrong though because now, the search engines can’t find you. You’ve lost your rank and it is puzzling you. Here’s a list of things that could cause just that situation to occur:
- Service interruptions.
- Your redirects failed.
- You lost well-ranking webpage contents or metadata.
- Your site now has broken links and images.
- Your site lost internal links.
- Your site’s information architecture changed.
Eek! Whichever of the above causes the problem, you’ll need to find it and fix it. The easiest way to do this is to undergo a website checkup with a professional web development consultant. They’ll analyze your website for the items needed for it to rank well with all algorithms. You receive a report that tells you specifically what you need to change to get it ranking well again.
With this in hand, you can hire a web designer or provide the consultation to your web developer. They fix it for you and your wonderful web rank goes back to normal.
Getting Help with the Mess of Lost SERP Ranking
Bake More Pies is here to help you! Call Bake More Pies today to get started solving your SERP rank problems.
