How to Determine and Improve Rankings Decline

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Process and tools of SEO to know what happened and how to fix it.

When the ranking of your website declines, your companies visits and capabilities decrease by time. And this might happen with less traffic and for most of the business, that means the profit decreases as well. Rapidly recognizing the impacted areas of the website and the elements that may have caused this decrease can let you fix or improve your site’s rankings.

The former SEO product manager of Macy’s Tech, Holly Miller Anderson explained her tools and methods she depends on to determine and fix the rankings decreases in a conference in SMX Next the current week.

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The tools and resources Anderson uses to get to the bottom of rankings declines.

Why would your rankings fall?

Anderson said what are the 3 potential reasons for the decline and noted how to determine them. She also said that it may be something that had changed on your website, some factors from the outside are impacting your website, or Google changed something.

He said about the things that may have changed on your websites that this can be a folder form that moved, updated codes, or live that corrupted something, your development employees created redirects by mistake, Googlebot is blocked from significant pages or some parts of your website negatively impacted the rankings after it changed. She also provided examples of why would a website ranking decreases and added the solutions to these issues.

 

Something changed by Google

A change in the algorithm would cause ranking decline as well. She said that generally if you see a severe decline in your website’s traffic and ranking, it’s a great signal that you have to search and discover why Google sees your website declining unexpectedly. If participants in your section lost rankings as well, there might be a common factor that has to be noted.

External factors in the market

These factors can scope from rivals publishing content that is more credible or thorough than yours such as breaking news that shakes up the search findings for a specific expression to search conduct changes because of Coronavirus, for instance.

If a competitor overtook your rankings, SEOs can visit the content to fix it once more. Though, there are other plots that would happen, coronavirus pandemic for example that made things out of control according to Anderson.

Determining the reason behind a rankings decline

Anderson advises us to use software for business platforms, Google search, Google analytics, and a list of questions to explain the potential reasons why rankings would dip.

What are the searches with high volumes lost in their rankings?

If your high volume keywords rankings declined, it might have been happened by a change in the website that made your content less credible. Determining what changes happen will let you know the issue so you can fix it.

Rather than that, your website might have been impacted by an update in the algorithm. Focusing on the rankings of your competitors’ may support this clarification.

Have your rankings declined during the increase of your direct competitors?

Anderson stated that noticed that this will be complicated to know in verticals where business, officially, and credibility factors are working in the medical, financial, or other Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) departments.

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A rankings decline might be a result of your internal teams changing one of the items listed above.

Did any indirect competitors overtake you in rankings?

In this situation when you haven’t made any change to your website, those competitors may indirectly have invested in their website’s content or fixed their website design. If you used software for the enterprise, you can get a better outline of the indirect competitors’ online presence and visibility to decide if this is one of the declining reasons

Are your direct and domain competitors rankings are declining?

An update in the algorithm can impact likely websites in your vertical, declining rankings all over those websites. “Now, you have to begin looking for what other SEO experts are viewing in their information to understand better what was the target of the algorithm and how you can take actions to retrieve your rankings, according to Anderson.

Which particular area of your field rankings’ declined?

The answer to this question will assist you while backtracking to know if rankings are declining because of the content that was updated or that has technical limitations on a page.

An update in the algorithm can also cause rankings to dip for specific pages on your website: For example, when the Penguin update was published, it earmarked pages, that there were so many links on the page.

Distinguishing exterior elements that might impact your rankings

The page of the search results might change to adapt to what users are searching for more often. What people are searching for is also changed by the trends, breaking news, or disturbance in daily life. These are the tools that Anderson recommends to use if you’re experiencing ranking declining.

  • Google Trends can tell you how popular a search term is and how popular it has been historically.
  • Twitter is good for determining news that may be impacting your clients and their purchasing conduct.
  • SparkToro is a public tool that can assist you with understanding what companies may be ranking higher than you and which companies or even person you might need to cooperate with to boost your visibility.
  • Glimpse this tool tracks emerging trends and can assist you understand your content strategy for better credibility.
  • Pinterest Trends gives ideas on the trending topics over Pinterest. It’s now in testing.
  • eMarketer gives market research information on trends and how customers are reacting to them.