Things to do after your ranking dropped

From poorly written content to an unmaintained website, an immediate drop in rankings can result from anything. Nobody likes to see a drop when the organic search rankings are in free fall or you experience a small loss of place on a secondary keyword. Although fluctuations are inevitable, particularly in the face of rolling updates to Google's real-time algorithm, it is never good news when your search rankings begin to trend in the wrong direction.

However, we have to remember that Google updates do not usually target particular industries. Some in the SEO industry tend to believe that Google's "targets" market niches with each update. But that mindset misses Google's emphasis on relevance. The purpose of this post is to find any pre-existing or new issues so you can fix them and get back on track with your SEO.

Check your Basic SEO

Can bots crawl your website?

Robots.txt is a text file located in your web server's top-level directory which tells bots how to interact with your website. You can set inclusions and exclusions, for example, disallowing bots from crawling a dev site, or indexing duplicate sites. You can use Google Search Console to check for any crawl errors that conflict with your site's indexing or visibility. Navigate to Coverage Report, so you can deal one by one and once finished, mark as fixed.

Are your pages still being indexed?

To see if your website is being indexed. In Google search, type in “site:yourwebsitelink.com”. You can also check the way search engines see your website using Google's URL Inspection Tool.

Do you have optimised home page titles and meta descriptions, and do the search results display them correctly?

Although basic elements (like meta description) as a ranking factor for search engines are declining in importance, they still have an impact. Check if your basic metadata elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and headings don't hold your rankings back.The title tag on your home page represents a big opportunity to tell search bots about what your page is all about. If it is generic, or if it is not displaying properly, it will affect your rankings. Although meta description does not directly affect SEO, a clear, convincing meta can boost click-through rates.

Does your page have an optimised h1 tag?

Apart from the info that you include in the title tag, the main heading lets users know the page's main purpose or what the page is about. However, unless it contains an H1 tag, search bots cannot distinguish it from the rest of your page 's content. Always make your title tag and header unique and never forget to add an H1 tag.

Do you have any unfixed technical SEO issues?

Technical SEO affects the way robots scan and crawl your website content. Although you have technically optimised your website, the troubles may occur whenever you add or delete some files or pages. So make sure that you are aware of your site's technical SEO problems:

• Does your page returning 200 HTTP status
• Are the redirects still in place?
• Do you have broken links?
  

You can recover your rankings again, simply appreciate what you have gone through.

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