Categories: SEO

5 Reasons Why Your SEO Ranking Drop and How to Handle Them

Help! My Google Rankings Dropped Here is some SEO rank drop reasons Picture this situation: You’re running a website that, at one point, held the top ranking on Google. Over the past few months, you begin to see your web traffic slowly dying down from millions of hits to a few hundred thousand hits, and then to nothing a few months after that. You search yourself on Google, but find your website is no longer on the first page, and you wonder why. We have some of the possible answers that may be SEO rank drop reasons. Let’s take a look at five common reasons your website may be losing traffic.

Your Website Violates Google?s Content Guidelines

Google has very strict guidelines about how they rank websites. If you find yourself with little or no traffic and look in your email to find a notice from Google, you have likely run afoul of Google’s policies regarding content. The number one rule for Google is “Content, content, content”. If you have a lot of spammy or low-quality content, Google will penalize you.

Keyword stuffing is a big no-no. These are just two examples of old, but still, surprisingly common practices that will earn you a Google violation and cause your traffic to drop significantly. Refer to this article to find out about bad SEO practices you might still be using.

Google violations can be removed. You will need to check your Search Console account. Inside the Messages menu under Warnings, you will find any manual actions taken against you. The message will include instructions on how to have the manual action lifted. Follow these instructions. You will then need to petition Google to take another look at your website. If you pass, the manual action will be lifted.

Irrelevant key word

Another SEO rank drop reasons are Your Keywords Are Either Obsolete or Not Relevant to Your Region Using obsolete keywords is a recipe for disaster. When people search on Google, they are actually using keywords to simplify their searches to get the most relevant results. Google has become so advanced these days that it can even search websites based on location. There’s a hint for you, in case you missed it!

However, you also need to take into account that nearly all industries change over time, so if you’re one of those people that are asking yourself Hey, I used this keyword x years ago, and it worked fine, why is it not getting me anything now, it’s because that particular keyword has likely become obsolete. Furthermore, keywords can vary by region. The best way to find out if you’re using the right keywords is to do keyword research. Use Google Trends to find highly-used keywords in your country, or join communities with similar interests. Sometimes you can find communities that offer amazing insight into your particular industry.

Spammy or Low-Quality Backlinks

This is also one of the SEO rank drop reasons, Just as low-quality content on your site can get you penalized by Google, you can also get penalized if you link to other sites that have low-quality content. Here’s why: In the days before the Panda and Penguin updates, websites used backlinking to rank on Google. These sites often had spammy or spun content stuffed with keywords users commonly put into Google.

The result was that you would perform a search for something like fish tanks and get a whole host of well, let’s just call them . Not Safe for Worksites just for the sake of professionalism and good taste, shall we The point is that Google looks upon poor backlinking as a way to game the system so to speak. In essence, you’re trying to gain artificial hits using very questionable methods, and that doesn’t sit right with Google. The above example is a good reason why you should always check the quality of your backlinks.

Poor Website Speed

Poor website speed is the most SEO rank drop reason for our website. We know it’s tempting to use those free hosting providers you see floating around the Internet. After all, free hosting is a great way to cut costs and increase your profit margin, right Wrong! What you may not realize is that a lot of these free hosting plans offer what’s called shared hosting, which means the speed of the server on which your site is hosted is highly dependent on the amount of traffic going to that particular server.

Since you’re sharing bandwidth with other websites, it’s quite possible that the amount of traffic will bog your site down tremendously, and nobody likes a slow website. Just think of what you would do if you encountered a business that had a slow website. While free hosting may work for the average Joe Schmoe that doesn’t expect to get a lot of visitors, a business has to show a lot more confidence than that!

High Website Downtime

It is also another SEO rank drop reason. This will lead us to another caveat with shared hosting it doesn’t guarantee 100% uptime and may even have a bandwidth cap. Downtime on a website is bad for business. If a customer, or worse, a potential customer visits your website only to be greeted with a 404 error, it’s going to create the impression that the quality of your services or products is as bad as the quality of your website. Do yourself and your customers a favor, and look into dedicated hosting options. It will cost some money, but don’t you think the rise in traffic would be well worth the cost

Hosting

If you don’t have the money, knowledge, or staff to handle the large-scale management inherent to dedicated hosting, you might look into what’s called VPS hosting. This type of hosting is best described as a low-cost upgrade for shared hosting. You will still have some of the bandwidth limitations. But every website has a dedicated partition on the server, so each site runs at a higher speed. This type of hosting is great for small businesses because of its typically low cost. Your chosen hosting company will likely offer different types of hosting plans. Most, if not all of them, will offer dedicated hosting, no bandwidth cap, and a high amount of uptime. Some services are quite affordable, while others are on the expensive side.

Be sure to choose a plan that best fits your business as it currently stands. You can always upgrade to a higher plan later if the influx of new customers becomes too much for your current hosting package. And upgrading will cause very little downtime, especially if your provider can guarantee a high uptime. Just as not enough hosting can cause a serious drop in traffic, too much hosting might take a larger bite out of your profits than you can effectively handle.

Conclusion SEO is the lifeblood of any website. There is no easy way to get your website to the first page on Google. Using the wrong SEO practices can reduce your website to nothing more than a collection of bytes sitting on a server. It takes dedication and hard work to rank high on Google. But the resulting web traffic you will receive is well worth the amount of effort you put in. Hopefully, this article will help you with your quest to the top.

Riya