1. Stay Up-to-Date On Keyword Trends
Google’s search algorithms are updated on a regular basis, changing the way search results are returned to users. This does not imply that you have no control over the situation- as long as you stay up to date. Ignoring current search trends can, in fact, have a significant impact on your site’s search exposure. If your website’s most important landing pages have seen a drop in traffic and rankings, it’s worth reviewing their keyword objectives to ensure you’re still on top of what people are looking for. Google Trends is a great place to start because it may tell you whether your desired keywords have dropped gradually or dramatically.
2. Check-In with your Web Developer
Check up with your developer or senior colleagues to see if the site has undergone any substantial changes. Then, using tools like Screaming Frog, you may request a new crawl of the domain to see if any pages have been flagged as no-index or stripped of content.
3. Find Out If You’ve Been Penalized
A manual or algorithmic penalty may have been applied to you. If your site is reported for not following Google’s quality rules, a manual penalty will be applied, causing your rankings to suffer as a result. Manual penalties are easy to identify because you’ll receive a message from Google in your Google Search Console account’s Manual Action area. Alternatively, you could have been penalized by an algorithm. Examine your website for any potentially negative backlinks that you may have recently gained, as well as any duplicate or poorly written content.
4. Don’t Ignore SEO Essentials
Neglecting technical SEO essentials such as page load speed, mobile compatibility, pages covering identical themes, targeting the same keywords, and so on could be playing into reduced visibility and site traffic.
5. Check That You Haven’t Lost Backlinks
Losing any relevant and high-quality external links has the same effect on your search visibility as gaining them. If any backlinks referring to your site are lost or made temporarily unavailable, it could have a significant impact on the authority of your site. This could result in a decline in ranks. Use expert tools like Ahrefs to uncover external links that have recently been lost to aid in the recovery of any lost backlinks. Alternatively, Google Analytics is an excellent tool for detecting traffic reductions from certain referral sources.
