Dropped in the Rankings? Diagnose, Minimize & Reverse the Damage

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

It’s one of the worst feelings a website owner can experience: opening up your analytics dashboard one morning and staring at a graph of search rankings in freefall. While your first instinct might be to panic, especially if you’ve just put a bunch of work into optimizing your website, try to stay calm. Sudden, drastic position losses are not the end of the world. In fact, if you take a methodical, organized approach to figuring out what went wrong, and how to fix it, you can make sure your lost rankings are temporary and completely reversible.

Follow our step by step guide to troubleshoot what could be causing your site to lose ranking so you can fix the issue that’s reducing your organic search traffic.

Determine the Extent of the Problem

When you first see that your traffic has dropped, head to your analytics and check each traffic channel: direct, referral, organic search and paid (if you’re running paid campaigns). If all of your traffic is dropping, it could be a technical problem with your site. If just your search traffic has fallen off, that’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got an SEO problem.

When trying to diagnose the reason behind your lost rankings, first you need to determine the scope of the issue: Is it related to a few individual keywords, or is it your site as a whole that’s losing rankings? Your problem could also be caused by a group of keywords or your pages within a particular category.

Those with a WooRank Advanced Review of their sites can use the SERP Checker to check their keyword rankings. It could be the case that every keyword lost ranking at the same time, which would indicate there’s a problem with your site, or your site has been hit by a site-wide penalty. Alternatively, if only certain keywords lost position, you probably have a problem with those particular landing pages or keyword categories.

For example, if you’re a garden supply store, it could be that a drop in traffic could be caused by a site wide issue or a loss of rankings for your "BLACK+DECKER cordless electric mower" keyword. Or, you could be losing ranking for every keyword in your lawn mower category.

Sadly, not everyone has a WooRank Advanced Review, and therefore can’t take advantage of the SERP Checker. If that’s the case, you can use your Google Search Console to check how keywords rank. Head to the Search Analytics report and make sure you’re looking at data for queries (this should be the default view) and check the box for Position — clicks won’t tell the whole story.

Look at positions for individual keywords to spot sudden, drastic ranking drops of 10 or more positions. See if you can spot any patterns or trends to the keywords that lost ranking. Or, if every keyword has seen a huge drop, there’s a good chance you’ve got a site wide issue on your hands.

View the position of your landing pages as well. Look for a pattern around what sort of pages are losing position and traffic. It could be that a particular type of content is losing its ranking power, or maybe a feature you’ve rolled out (such as Flash content or a widget that contains outbound links) to certain pages is hurting your SEO.

Diagnosing the Issue

So after you’ve dug into your analytics data and determined the scope of your ranking drop, it’s time to start diagnosing exactly what caused the lost positions. There’s going to be a lot of reports and tools thrown at you from here on out, but don’t get intimidated, it’s not as complicated as it looks.

Check Site Status and Robots.txt

Of course, if Google can’t access your site it can’t rank. So make sure your site is up and running. If you haven’t already, visit your site now to make sure you can access it. Use a variety of devices to make sure you can view your desktop, mobile and tablet versions. Check the Crawl Errors report in Google Search Console to find if there’s an issue that’s only affecting some of your internal pages. Check the guide to robots.txt to troubleshoot errors in robots.txt files.

One common issue that blocks Google from crawling your site is issues with your robots.txt file. First, check to make sure you aren’t inadvertently blocking crawlers to your whole site, which would look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This is one of the most common issues with robots.txt files, especially if you’ve recently migrated your site.

You can use the Fetch As Google feature in Google Search Console to make sure there isn’t a problem that prevents Google from accessing your pages and the robots.txt tester to make sure your robots.txt file is written correctly.

If the robots.txt file is correctly written and submitted to Google, verify that you haven’t accidentally disallowed any pages you want to appear in search results. You could go through your file line by line, but that will take forever if you have a lot of disallowed pages. Instead use the site: search operator. Just do a Google search for site:yourdomain.com, and Google will return the pages it has in its index. Make sure your meta description appears as it should, as disallowed pages often still appear in the results, but with a message to highlight that that a description for the result is not available. Your most important pages should be appearing at the top of the rankings, so if they’re not there’s something going on.

Audit Your Site

There’s always the possibility that your site isn’t as optimized for search engines as you think, or you may have inadvertently hurt your SEO by a change you recently pushed live. So the first step in figuring out why you lost ranking is to do an SEO audit of your site or affected pages. The WooRank audit analyzes more than 70 SEO factors, so you don’t have to go digging through your page code and content to spot those hard to find issues.

Continue reading %Dropped in the Rankings? Diagnose, Minimize & Reverse the Damage%

by Sam Gooch via SitePoint