Your rankings have dropped? What to do now
It is important to see where you rank for your most important keywords. But once you see your site dropping in rankings, it is obviously not a great feeling. Google changes their algorithm fairly frequently so it is normal to see fluctuations in rankings.
But sometimes your sites can be free diving. There are some things you can do to prevent that from happening. The first thing to do is to be proactive to be able to save your sites and get the ball rolling in the right direction.
Having the basics set up on your site will help it out quite a bit. It is easy to get carried away with the nitty gritty and more complicated strategies of search engine optimization. But making sure you set up a good foundation for your on-page SEO cannot be neglected.
A 200-series status code indicates that sites can be communicated with successfully. There are free sites that will indicate if you meet the standard 200 OK status code since that points to a successful HTTP request.
Also make sure bots can crawl your site if you want it to rank and show up in searches. But if it is duplicate content, set it for bots not to crawl your page. This is because Google actually penalizes sites that have content that is copy and pasted.
The next point is fairly standard but it can be easily overlooked. Basic SEO aspects are reducing in importance as a key ranking agent but it still has an influence. These are things like meta descriptions, title tags, and headings. When thinking about your title, make sure not to pick something too generic. Don’t forget to add it as a title tag for search bots to know what your page is describing.
As mentioned earlier, Google makes updates to their algorithm quite frequently. There are people in the industry such as Barry Schartz and Gary Illyes that keep their eyes open for the next new change. Since no one really know what the algorithm is, with A/B testing and trial and error, we can notice differences.
Another tip is to search on Google Search Console since they are more clear on what to look for in a website. If you follow the rules and take into consideration the feedback provided, it can actually improve your search standings. This is a free service that allows the user to monitor, maintain and optimize a site’s prominence in search.
