If you have a website, then you will know how important it is for you to get ranked and keep it that way. If you are having a hard time making sure that your ranking is the best that it can be or if you want to ensure that you are not losing out when it comes to sales, then this is the ultimate guide for you.

You’re Not Tracking the Right Rankings

If your site has been online for a long time, there’s a high chance that your keywords are not relevant in this day and age. You need to think about your searching behaviour, and you also need to compare that to how the keywords are showing up in your console data. It may be that you are using niche terminology that is not aligning with what your potential customers understand as well. A lot of people will search for variations of the same question if they are unable to find a solution to the problem that they are having. Engineers at Google have worked hard to make sure that they are using natural language comprehension a lot, and in this day and age, it’s far easier for you to rank if you keep the content you have in plain language.

Reasons why your Website Rankings have Plummeted

Lost Links

Another reason why your search engine ranking may drop is because you have lost a number of links. You need to check your site for links that may have been lost over the last 90 days or so. If you have lost a lot of links then this is probably why your ranking is so bad right now. You also need to look to see if your link drop is sitewide or if there are a lot of links lost on certain pages of your site. If the latter is the case, then this could be because your page is not relevant or because you are posting information that does not relate to your keywords. If your inbound links are lost, then you can remove them or you can replace them if you want. Either way, you need to stay on top of this if at all possible. If you need some help, digital marketing agencies can sort this for you.

Bad Redirects

If you are launching a new website or if you are migrating to a whole new server then there’s a high chance that your ranking is going to suffer. If you have a solid 301 redirect plan in place then this will help you out quite a lot, and it will stop you from having to worry too much about the long-term health of your site. Broken redirects are a nightmare for an SEO expert. When you are using a 301, you need to make sure that the XML sitemap and any canonical tags are updated too. If you put up a 301 redirect then this is very similar to a change of address notice in the digital world. The notice will tell any search engine that the page in question, or even several pages, are being moved. You will also be asking your visitors to be sent to the new page and not the old one. If you do this properly then you will not lose rankings, and you will not get penalised for having duplicate language either.

Manual Actions

If you see a significant drop in your site ranking, then this could well indicate that Google is penalising your site. Manual actions are usually applied, as opposed to general algorithmic updates.  If your site continues to rank on engines such as Bing, then this really does show that you are suffering from a Google-specific penalty. It doesn’t matter whether the penalty is manual or automatic because you ideally want to fix the issue as soon as possible. You also need to make sure that you get the penalty removed afterwards too.

Algorithm Changes

Google is continually looking for ways to improve their strategies and their results too. They do this by implementing algorithm changes. A lot of sites have in fact been hurt by these changes and they have suffered from low site rankings as a result. If you want to avoid being absolutely crippled by Google updates, then you need to focus on using cross-channel updates if possible. You also need to focus on boosting your channel marketing and your traffic as well. If you can do this, then you’ll soon find that you are able to come out on top without experiencing any ranking penalties.

Author

Sumit is a Tech and Gadget freak and loves writing about Android and iOS, his favourite past time is playing video games.

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