So you set out to create an SEO strategy with the hope of boosting your rankings which will hopefully result in increased traffic, higher conversions, more leads, and business growth. As far as you’re concerned, you’re employing only the best and acceptable practices. However, you still experienced a drop in rankings.

Initially, it’s normal to get worried. But it’s important to act fast and figure what caused that ranking drop and address it from there. Typically, negative ranking changes happen for several reasons. Some can be dealt with on your end, while others are just way beyond your control.

Let’s look at 10 reasons why websites experience ranking changes and the ways on how to deal with them.

1. Links

Links leading to your domain can affect your rankings in several ways.

First, if you have an influx of new links leading to your website, you can experience a temporary drop in rankings. This usually happens when you had issues in the past regarding unnatural links.

Meanwhile, lost links can also contribute to a ranking change. This happens when there are links going to your website that has been removed or may be temporarily unavailable.

Low quality links pointing to your website is a bane of SEO, and you want to avoid them at all cost if you want to maintain good rankings. If you have a lot of poor and irrelevant links leading to your website, search engines can view that as spamming and your website can be penalized or worst, get de-indexed. If you fell victim to link buying schemes or manipulative linking practices, it’s recommended to do a link clean-up.

Track links actively and continue building up high quality links to your domain. You can do this through creating quality content that’s share-worthy, substantial, and relevant. You can also market your content and brand through participating in different platforms to share your insights and expertise.

2. Search engine penalties

Search engines can also penalize websites if they violate the practices recommended for SEO, which are ultimately geared towards improving user experience on the web.

When Google rolled out the Panda algorithm, a lot of websites suffered a huge drop in rankings because of thin and low-quality content. Meanwhile, websites who employed spammy linking techniques were greatly affected when the Penguin algorithm update rolled out.

If you have been penalized, don’t fret. It may feel like doom and gloom has set upon your website, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t recover. What you need to do is to re-assess your website, revamp your strategy, remove low quality content and links,  adhere to recommended practices moving forward, and always monitor the performance of your website.

3. Search engine changes and tests

There are cases when search engines implement changes or conducts trials, and it may affect your rankings. There’s not much you can do about these instances as they are not within your control. If you’re employing best SEO practices, you wouldn’t have to worry so much and you can expect your rankings to be back up in a few days. 

4. Slow page speed

Page speed plays a crucial role in user experience, and ultimately in your rankings. It wouldn’t matter if your website has the most comprehensive design and content if it will not load fast enough. So check your servers, and make sure that they are efficient in giving your visitors a fluid way of navigating your website. Likewise, use tools that can help track your website’s page speed and determine what elements are slowing down your pages.

5. On-page problems

Sometimes, issues within your pages cause your rankings to take a plunge. It could be due to poor internal linking and optimization of your website, incorrect robots.txt file, incorrect canonical tags, absence of index tags, slow page speed, or worst, due to a hacking incident. This further reiterates the importance of conducting website maintenance and regular monitoring of on-site elements so that you can spot errors and address them before they can affect rankings.

6. Competition

If you used to be on the first spot and you suddenly dropped one to two notches, it could be that your competitor outperformed you. While it’s important to always keep your website well-maintained and strategies in-line with acceptable marketing methods, you also need to monitor your competitors if you want to stay on top. Be aware of their recent actions so that you can stay one step ahead and devise new strategies before they do.

7. Website modifications

A decrease in rankings can also be caused by changes made on your website like a new design or updates in the code, layout, plug-ins, and other components. Make sure that all key persons involved in your internet marketing efforts are in the loop with these changes, so that you can avoid any implication on other areas of SEO and on your placement on the SERPs.

8. Changes in user behavior

User behavior is one of the reasons why SEO is dynamic and ever-changing. If your strategies are not connected with how users behave, you can experience a drop in rankings.

There are cases when the way users input queries changes, which happens when they demand for fresher results. This occurs when a particular subject becomes trending. As a result, news and more up to date pieces about the topic dominate the top of the SERPs and evergreen content are pushed down. Since that is the case, it pays to be abreast in your industry, so that you’re always in the forefront of delivering quality and up to date content to your target audience.

9. Changes in click-through rates

If your click-through rate has dropped, it could be the reason why your rankings experienced a decline. Remember that Google is all about user experience and generating results that they think is the most relevant to search queries. If you proved that your CTR is to blame for the drop in your rankings, you can work on improving your listing on the SERPs.

10. Poor content

Even if it sounds like a cliché, content is king when it comes to SEO. Poor content can drive your rankings down or worst, take you out of the SERPs altogether. Devote time in developing quality posts that your target audience would be compelled to share and cite as source. If you master the art of content marketing, traffic, links, good reputation, and high rankings will follow suit.

Fortunately, small business owners can avoid getting knocked out of their precious rankings by observing the web marketing trends that are readily available to them. Many search engine marketers have spent their time and effort into studying these trends and seeing clear patterns that would help websites become favorable to search engines and determine what methods will most likely get them penalties. Here is a list of the most widely used strategies that can either propel you to the very top or take you straight to the bottom.

The DOs: SEO Best Practices for Optimum Online Visibility

The deal with SEO today is that there are literally an endless array of methods that marketing companies and business owners use to improve page ranking and attract potential customers to their respective businesses. Mentioned below are the SEO strategies and concepts that are considered to be among the most effective in terms of:

• giving websites a high ranking
• driving targeted traffic to websites
• converting ordinary web visitors into customers
• making website content, layout, and images compelling and interesting enough to convince visitors to visit more than once.

Do Innovate

Nothing draws in attention like a fresh, brilliantly-written, and informative content with an innovative topic. Becoming a pioneer in your industry content-wise entails taking the initiative when it comes to content creation. You have to develop ideas and turn them into topics that provide the readers with a fresh perspective.

When you try to create content for the sake of adding more web pages or for the sake of obtaining new indexing signals is a not the a very effective strategy. Each and every single piece of content that is on your website needs to be one-of-a-kind, providing crucial information about your company, without sounding overly promotional. Know what your clients will be looking for in your website, and work hard to provide them with what they need, offering them a deeper understanding of the topic, product, or service that they want to know about.

Avoid duplicate content, where Google and other major search engines are quick to devalue such. Any information found on your site that has previously been posted on another site will be tagged as duplicate content. This is to ensure that content remains original and those who came up with the ideas and topics get the credit that they deserve.

Do Think About Your Visitors

If there is one thing you need to know about content, it is that they should always be created with the reader in mind. A website can only perform well if it is able to satisfy its visitors and turn them into clients. Otherwise, searchers will not be returning to the website, so it is important that you present them with your best content and convince them that you have an outstanding brand the first time they visit your website. It is one of the SEO best practices that will be going away anytime soon.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine whether each page addresses common visitor concerns:

• Does the page look trustworthy?
• Are you sending a clear message?
• Does the page contain all the vital info that your clients need?
• Does the page contain your business’ contact information?

A good rule of thumb to continuously enhance user experience . Keep your website navigable and well-organized. Use good quality images but ensure that your website loads easily to keep visitors from waiting to long.

Do Provide Reliable Information

Web searchers have the following primary reasons for using the internet:

• Get information
• Communicate
• Ask for help
• Online Shopping

Judging from the aforementioned, your content should fulfill any of these roles. A website copy should not only answer questions that users have, but also provide them with suggestions and other vital information about your brand that can convince them to become your clients.

What NOT to Do: Black Hat Techniques Should Never Be Part of SEO Best Practices

Some website owners and marketing companies have been known to use certain tactics that, in a way, allowed them to achieve faster results when it comes to website rankings. However, these strategies are unnatural and disrupts the natural process that Google and other search engines have laid out for websites. Such methods are regarded as cheating the algorithms that were put into place in order to make the search results as relevant to the queries as possible. The key to getting the top spot is to focus on quality, relevance, and uniqueness of content, and so spammers are taken out of the rankings.

Don’t Use Tricks

SEO tricks that work immediately but do more harm in the long run is never a good move. Such an unethical marketing strategy will eventually catch on, and when Google is able to identify the trick you pulled to get to your high ranking, you can either move down in the ranks or get penalized for it. Avoid shortcuts, just invest on quality, natural strategies that build your reputation slowly but surely. Avoid the following:

• Duplicate content
• Article spinning
• Invisible text
• Keyword stuffing
• Doorway pages
• Link Schemes

Bottomline: Stick to SEO Best Practices

As Google and other search engines roll out with new algorithm updates, keep on following their lead and use strategies that help you achieving the best results for your website. While black hat techniques are known to boost rankings almost immediately, the effects are only temporary, not to mention a very likely chance of getting penalties from Google that would hurt your brand’s reputation.