Reasons Why Your Website is Losing Rankings

[guest post by David Grover]

There are lots of reasons why this happens, but most of them can be fixed. You will only be able to fix them, however, if you know what caused the drop in the first place. Here we will look at some of the main reasons why you could be dropping ranks, and what this means for your website.

Your Keywords are Outdated

This is a big problem for websites which have been around for a long time. You might think that you are doing great with set keywords and phrases, but then suddenly your rankings start to drop and you aren’t getting as many hits to the site. What is the reason for this? It could be that you are using the wrong keywords.

These days, people are more likely to be using voice recognition software such as Siri to perform searches, which means they are using complete phrases instead of keywords. This is called “natural language,” indicating that searches are being phrased as if they were spoken – and this is increasingly true even when the search is typed. You may need to update your keyword strategy to account for this shift.

New Design

When you change the design or wording on your website, rankings will drop straight away. This is actually no cause for alarm, but is due to Google losing track of the website just for a little while. Your SEO may well be better, but it takes time for Google to catch up and rank you again. Make sure your website is well optimized and that any redirects from old URLs are in place before the launch, and you should find things getting back to normal within two months at the very most. Normally, it’s even quicker.

To combat the drop in search results, make sure that you promote your new design as much as possible so that people are interested in taking a look. This might help keep your daily views a little higher rather than seeing them drop away completely.

Bad Links

One of the big strategies years ago was to buy thousands of links all pointing to your website. Google caught on to this pretty quickly, however, and realized that the links were a form of spam. Now it penalizes websites using this technique. Your ranking may all but disappear if Google thinks you are trying to trick it with false links.

If you are being affected by this, get rid of those sites and links as fast as you can. The real measure of a good link is one that is placed naturally, without being forced, and which comes from a site which is itself high quality.

Losing Good Links

Even if you have lots of good links, your ranking may drop. This happens when the links disappear – they might have been deleted from the page, or perhaps the website itself has been taken down. You should always be trying to attract links from good quality sources. Making content that people want to share is a good way to do this naturally.

Bad Hosting

If your hosting company isn’t good enough to help with fast page loads, Google will promote other sites which load quicker. Pay for a business account where your website is not sharing a server with thousands of others and you will see an improvement.

There are lots of tricks to getting your rankings high, but the best policy is to build the best website you possibly can and then work on creating great content.

** About the Author: David Grover is a Communications Manager at Timeo, a useful tool for businesses in the UK. He’s also a freelance career coach who’s always eager to share his experience. In his free time, he enjoys traveling.