What to Do If Your Search Rankings Drop on Google

Your traffic is steadily growing. Everything is going swimmingly for your website—and then, overnight, pageviews plummet and your business is hobbled. It’s an all-too-common scenario that plays out every year for businesses big and small. Unfortunately, Google holds a monopoly on search, so when you fall out of its good graces, it can be devastating for your business. If you find yourself facing a sudden drop in search traffic, here’s how to handle it. How to Know If Your Search Rankings Have Dropped If you’re the type who keeps a close eye on your stats at all times, you may also be prone to spiraling into a panic over any dip in search traffic. There are many reasons for temporary fluctuations in traffic—and sometimes visits may decrease for no apparent reason at all, then rebound in a few days. It’s important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Go back to last year and compare it to this year—were there similar fluctuations? In Google Analytics, review trends for your organic search traffic inside the Acquisitions section on the left navigation. If you’re seeing a sustained decrease in traffic, you might have a problem on your hands. There are a few reasons why your rankings may have changed. These include: Manual Penalties Unless you’re buying links or using other black hat SEO techniques, you shouldn’t have to worry about getting a manual penalty—and if you do, you’ll receive an alert in Search Console, so you’ll know if this is your issue. If bad links have caused you to get a manual penalty, disavow the links that look sketchy—even if it’s not something you actually paid for. Algorithm Updates This is probably the most likely cause of a sudden drop in rankings. While Google’s bigger algorithm updates are anticipated by SEO experts well in advance and then analyzed to death after the fact, there are also small updates happening daily and sometimes you fall on the wrong side of them. The best thing you can do here is find out the details of the algorithm updates. It’s easy to find information about the big core updates, but for the smaller ones you may need to look to niche forums and discussion groups in your industry to see whether similar businesses have experienced changes in their rankings, as these updates often target specific types of websites. Knowing Google’s rationale for algorithm changes can help you get back on the search giant's good side by adjusting your content, website or SEO strategy accordingly. How to Be Prepared the Next Time Google Changes Its Algorithm Changes You’ve Made Did you redesign your website? Move from Wix to WordPress? Rewrite your homepage? Changes you make to your site design or content can also impact your search rankings. Often, the key here is patience—wait it out a bit and, as long as the changes you’ve made are sound from an SEO perspective, your rankings should bounce back or even end up higher than they were before. If, on the other hand, the changes you’ve made were detrimental to your SEO efforts—perhaps your site redesign removed important keywords from your homepage—you may want to consider making improvements or even reverting back to what you had before. Backlink Changes If you use Ahrefs (and you should!) you can easily generate a report of lost links. Reach out to site owners who have deleted your links and see if it’s possible to get them back. If this isn’t possible, start a new link building campaign to make up for what you’ve lost. More Steps to Take In addition to the steps above, when your search rankings drop, it’s a good idea to redouble your SEO efforts. There’s a lot you can’t control when it comes to SEO, so you should do everything possible to optimize what you can. Assess your site performance and speed, create compelling content that serves a real purpose for your audience, and build relationships (and links) with others in your industry and community.