When you see there is a traffic drop in your organic visitors, it can be due to the fact that the ranking for some SEO keywords went down. However, it can also be due to other problems. This is why you should always start by making sure that an SEO rankings change happened. If this is the case, it is time to take the necessary steps to recover your lost SEO keyword rankings and organic traffic. Fortunately, this is something that is possible.
Many things can be said and it is obvious that the best thing to do always varies based on what caused your drops. At the same time, do not neglect the other improvements you could make, like using voice search. Constantly updating is always a pillar of search engine optimization.
Some of the things to consider include the following.
Did A Google Algorithm Update Happen?
New Google algorithm updates happen every single month. The good news is that there are numerous websites you can check to see if an update happened. Some of the resources you can check are:
If it was an algorithm update that led to the ranking drops, not much can be done. In this case, you need to understand exactly what Google penalized, why the change happened, and make the necessary changes in your overall SEO strategy.
Were Links Lost?
Check out the lost links reports that are offered by Majestic or Ahrefs. Look for an increase in how many links were lost or see if there are some high authority links that disappeared. If there is a technical problem that you can solve, you want to take care of that.
If you can recover some of the links and they are of good authority, this is the first thing to do. In the event that links were replaced with another source, you need to check it out to see how you can improve your content to make it more appealing.
Did You Make Site Changes?
This is particularly important in the event that you have some pages that dropped in rankings. Were there some modifications that you did in the past month? For instance, did you change some URLs? Did you remove the keyword from an H1 or H2 tag? Is Google capable of reaching the content present on the page?
The good news when you made some changes is that there is a really good possibility that you can regain the traffic that is lost. Just revert the changes. Pay extreme attention to when Google cannot read the page’s content. This is very important and the fix is not a simple one.
Did You Change Some Internal Links?
Practically all SEO blogs out there talk about the importance of internal links in SEO. However, what many do not say is that changing the internal links that you previously added can become problematic. Also, with a blog, because of the fact that you keep adding new content on a regular basis (which you should do), it is normal for some of the internal links to lose their value.
The most important locations to check for internal links are the top navigation bar, the footer navigation bar, sidebars, suggested blog posts, and suggested products.
Look at all affected pages and learn how many of the internal links were removed. Then, try to add them back. Unfortunately, it is not easy to determine how to properly fix this problem since it does depend a lot on the structure of the website. However, adding some extra links usually tends to solve the problem.
The Competition Made Changes
Ranking changes do not always happen because of something you did. Also, traffic drops are not necessarily an indication that something is wrong. As an example, right now we see content marketing drastically affected by covid-19. This is why you should take a look at what the competition does.
The best thing you can do if your competition ended up ranking higher for the keywords you target is to learn from what they did. You can easily find out what they did and try to implement similar strategies to improve SEO rankings in the future. You can imitate the competition but always do all you can so that you do things better.
