Positive Steps You Can Take When Your Site Loses Rankings
Perhaps this has happened to you: you awake one morning and find your site has disappeared from the search engine universe, nowhere to be found. Even if it’s only dropped a few pages, it might as well be a thousand.
What to do? Scream at your SEO guy? Pop open that Christmas bourbon a wee bit early in the day? Blame it on the President?
Changes in ranking happen regularly, but massive shifts as a result of an algorithm change are more dramatic, and can wreak havoc. While this is not at all within our control, take a peek at these 5 ways you can help control the damage.
5 Steps you can take to minimize a drop in rankings
- Have a site and rankings monitor in place – It’s a very good idea to have your site’s search engine position monitored, so you can not only see when there is a big problem, but also the trends taking place all the time in your rankings. There is no substitute for this kind of intelligence.
- Plug into social media more – There is a vast audience out there you can turn to for help with traffic and links, and this is social media. While it may be harder in some ways to convert this traffic, the mere fact that’s coming is a sign that your pages are still relevant, and this matters to Google.
- Look at your Google Webmaster Tools – This is a valuable resource that can help you spot penalties and SEO issues quickly. If you are not signed up for this, avail yourself of it immediately. It’s free and is full of useful assistance.
- Look into your SEO – when there are ranking problems, it’s always wise to look in the mirror first. See what if any SEO issues you can find with your pages, such as missing title tags, descriptions, alt tags, flash and some of the other 200 or so ranking factors. Like it or not, these issues are part of how Google ranks you pages.
- Produce more content and links – Make it your mission to continue to create good content and incoming backlinks. It might be a smart idea to expand your topic and keyword profile here, while still remaining relevant, to see if these pages begin to rank well.