It’s never a great feeling when upon checking your analytics, you find that your content is suddenly not ranking as high as it was just a day ago. For some reason, in the span of a day, your SEO metrics have dropped, which leaves you confused and scrambling to find out what exactly you need to do to fix them. This impacts your site and ultimately your ability to generate leads and conversions. If you believe that your rank in SERPs has dropped due to these issues, here’s how you can fix them.
You’ve Removed or Modified Your Content
You’re thinking of redesigning your site and this, of course, involves performing an audit of your site’s content where you get rid or alter a chunk of it to improve your rank in SERPs. You probably think that this is the most efficient way to boost your SEO efforts, but it might’ve actually resulted in reduced rankings.
How to Fix It: When conducting an audit, identify specific keywords that provide the most traffic and return on investment (ROI). For instance, if you’re getting great results for your keyword “search engine optimization Utah,” pay attention to content that contains this keyword before you remove or alter it in any way. If you can access pre-edited content, you can revert it back to the old one and then track it via analytics to monitor its performance.
Google Tweaked its Algorithm Again
The search engine giant can and do change its algorithm anytime they want. A majority of these tweaks are minor and won’t affect rankings, but when they roll out a major update, ranking rules can change overnight. In this case, your only move is to tailor fit your SEO strategy to match the update. Otherwise, you risk getting penalized by Google.
How to Fix It: Aside from tweaking your SEO efforts to fit the new update, avoid black hat strategies such as duplicate content, link schemes, and keyword stuffing etc. Focus on creating relevant content that users will find useful and in turn will lead to shares and user engagement. Get in the habit of monitoring your website regularly as well as removing and preventing the posting of user-generated spam commonly found in the comments section.
Your Website has Thin Content
According to Google, thin content is basically content that has little to no value for users. This a common tactic used by underperforming sites to try and increase their rankings.
How to Fix It: If you see a drop in your rankings, reevaluate your content’s functional and overall quality. Look closely for shallow pages such as low quality or irrelevant content from doorway pages and other sources, thin affiliate webpages, and automatically generated content. Put simply, get rid of content that doesn’t give visitors any value and develop content that’s helpful and insightful to site visitors.
Websites face many different errors every single day, but Google doesn’t really care, because all it cares about is the relevance and usefulness of your site. It doesn’t kid around when ranking the performance of websites. Essentially, regardless of why your rankings have suddenly plunged, it’s vital that you continue monitoring the performance of your site and altering its content to keep up with the seemingly never-ending algorithm updates that Google rolls out.
