Why Your Rankings Dropped

Seeing your website’s rankings suddenly drop can be a frustrating and confusing experience. It’s easy to assume the worst, but it’s important to take a deep breath and follow a simple, step-by-step process to find the cause. A ranking drop could be due to a technical issue, a content problem, or a change from a search engine.

This guide will walk you through the most common reasons why your rankings may have dropped and give you a simple checklist to get your SEO back on track.

Step 1: The Quick Checks

Before you dive into a full audit, you should check for a few common issues.

Check for a Google Penalty

The first thing you should do is check for a manual penalty from Google. A manual penalty is when a human reviewer at Google has found a serious problem with your website, such as spam or misleading content, and has penalized it. You can check for a manual penalty in your search console’s Security and Manual Actions report. If you see a “No issues detected” notice, you’re in the clear.

Check for Recent Changes

Have you made any recent changes to your website? A ranking drop can be caused by something as simple as a new plugin, a change to your URL structure, or a content update. You should try to find out if the ranking drop coincides with a change you made.

Step 2: Technical SEO Issues

A lot of ranking drops are caused by technical issues. These are problems that can prevent a search engine from crawling, indexing, and understanding your website correctly.

Indexing and Crawling Problems

A search engine can’t rank a page it hasn’t indexed. You should check your search console to see if your most important pages are still indexed. If they aren’t, it could be due to:

• A noindex tag: A noindex tag tells a search engine not to index a page. You should check to make sure that a noindex tag hasn’t been accidentally added to a page you want to rank.
• A robots.txt file: Your robots.txt file might be blocking a search engine from crawling a page you want to be indexed.
• Orphaned pages: An orphaned page is a page that has no links pointing to it. This makes it very hard for a search engine to find and index it.

Slow Pagespeed

Pagespeed is a direct ranking factor. A website with a slow loading speed will not rank as high as a faster one. You should check your website’s speed in a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights. It will give you a list of suggestions to fix the issues that are slowing you down. A comprehensive platform like Clickrank can help you with this. For example, the platform can scan your website for pagespeed issues and provide a prioritized list of tasks to fix them.

Broken Redirects and Links

If you have recently moved a page or changed a URL, you should check for broken redirects and links. A broken link can lead to a bad user experience and waste a search engine’s crawl budget.

Step 3: Content and Keyword Issues

If your technical SEO is perfect, the problem might be with your content or your keywords.

Lost Backlinks

Backlinks are a huge ranking factor. If you’ve lost a backlink from a high-quality website, it could be the cause of your ranking drop. You should check your backlink profile to see if any of your links have been removed.

Competitors Are Outranking You

Sometimes, your rankings drop not because of something you did wrong, but because a competitor did something right. You should check what your competitors are doing. Are they creating better content? Are they getting more backlinks? Are they providing a better user experience?

Keyword Changes

The keywords you are ranking for might be changing. A keyword that was popular a few months ago might not be popular today. You should use a keyword research tool to check for fluctuations in search volume and to find new keywords to target. Our platform’s keyword insights tool can help you with this. It can analyze your website and provide a list of keywords that you can use to boost your rankings.

Poor Content Quality

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most helpful and relevant content. If your content is thin, outdated, or poorly written, it might not rank as high as it should. You should always focus on writing for people, not for search engines. Our free AI Rewording Tool can help you ensure that your content is always fresh and readable.