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Has Your Search Ranking Just Dropped? Here’s Why It Happens

In today’s online and technologically advanced era, every business wants to maximize its sales and ROI on the internet. They hire professionals to design and develop a website, which they optimize further to increase its rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs). But getting Google, Bing, or Yahoo to place a webpage on top of the result pages isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Marketers need to set up the site correctly to bawl quality leads and convert them into paying customers. However, despite the aggressive effort being made, the webpage isn’t visited by the target audience as expected. A sudden plunge in the organic ranking of the page can cause such a decline in the number of people landing on the website. But what does affect the Google rank? Given below are certain reasons that clarify why exactly it happens and whether it can be resolved or not.

1) Tracking the Wrong Rankings

Has this ever happened that despite using fancy or sophisticated keywords to drive traffic on the site, you failed? It must have been frustrating to not get the desired results even after using the different variations of the same question. In the last few years, Google has shifted its preference towards natural and more simple language keywords to discern the ranks. Hence, if your website has old key phrases or incorporates more generic keywords, you probably are tracking the wrong rankings.

2) Lost Links

Use Majestic or Ahrefs and check the lost links in the past 90 days. These free backlink checkers will produce real-time information and allow links profile analysis. Lost links that you might come across can be the reason why the rankings have dropped. Lost or broken links can appear due to unintentional link removal, site update, or replacement of links made to a different source. So, first, you will need to find the source and the reason and then you can replace, remove, or retain them.

3) Broken Redirects

An act of launching a new website, migrating to a new server, or structural changes to the site, can likely drop ranking if done without a proper 301 redirect plan in place. Also, when using 301 redirects, you must update XML sitemaps, canonical tags, and links. If you do this correctly; you will not be penalized for duplicate content because Google indexes both old and new web addresses.

4) Manual Actions

The best way to check if the Google penalty is the reason for plummeting SERPs placement is to see how it is performing on other search engines like Bing or Yahoo. The evaluation and correction process begins from inside the Google Search Console account, wherein you can look for the warning messages and the Manual Actions section. It will provide you with the areas that aren’t complying with the guidelines and suggestions on how to fix the issues.

5) Algorithm Changes

Search engines keep on improving their standards and updates that set grounds for their ranking decisions. So, whenever they change algorithm updates, businesses that don’t keep themselves up-to-date with the scenario, experience a downward push in the SERPs. However, it is easy to avoid being crippled by such changes if you use effective cross-channel marketing and traffic strategy.

6) Competition

A dip in ranking can also be the result of competitors’ excellent strategies. Hence, it is important to analyze the performance of the competitors, including their social media activities, link building strategies, and content marketing. Having understood what the rival firm has done to outrank you, better manage the pages that aren’t doing well.

Shortcuts are mere myths if you are working on your website’s rank and traffic maximization goal. Instead of using sketchy tactics, you must gain profound knowledge about updates and best practices to grow your business visibility like a pro.

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