Sudden drop in SEO ranking could be due to competition

If you see a sudden drop in rankings of specific pages of your site, you shouldn’t panic and start looking for the reasons with the cool mind. First of all, you should monitor the drop.

See whether the organic traffic of the affected page(s) dropped Compare traffic week-over-week before and after the drop Is drop significantly on specific days like holiday or weekend? Check traffic using various tools like Google Search Console and Stat

Here Kayzoe Marketing shares some reasons for the sudden downfall in rankings

Figure out what went wrong with those pages

1. Did Google update its algorithm?

Google rolls out new updates to strengthen its algorithm every now and then and sometimes the updates are released stealthily. But there are leagues that document those changes. You can check new articles on Google. If there is an update then you will certainly find an article or blog on it. Also you can check updated with your SEO friends. If this is the issue, you can make necessary changes in your site to make it SEO friendly.

2. Did your site lose links?

Pull the lost links report of your site and see whether there is a noticeable link drop of your site. Focus on link-drop of affected pages. If you find that that the link-drop is the reason for drop in ranking then you should try recovering the links. See how links are lost and find ways to regain those links using your business connections with link exchange sites or the link-drop could be accidental.

3. Did you change the affected page(s)?

The affected pages are changed then Google will treat those pages are irrelevant to the targeted keywords. In this situation, the site rank and traffic will drop automatically. You shouldn’t change the URL as it is an identifier for search engine crawlers. A new URL means the page is new even when the content is old. Or you could have removed the targeted keyword from H1 or H2.

4. Did you change internal links of the affected page(s)?

Did you or your SEO team made any changes like addition or removal of internal links? You can check on your own and if you find that the site navigation affected internal linking of affected pages then you carry out repair work to restore the previous links so that Google restores the original ranking of the pages and the traffic resumes.

5. Google’s user feedback has a different opinion on your site

Google uses machine learning to assign rankings to websites and pages. It considers CTR from SERPs and also it takes into account time spent by each visitor on the site. Did you add a popup to your site? The popup could be increasing the bounce rate of your site. Checking server response time could help in determining users’ response to your site.

6. Competition has changed

The sudden drop of rank could be due to the massive change in competition. A steep hike in competition would make some sites to drop down to bottom and your site could be one of those sites. Check how your competitor sites are doing and whether they also faced a drop in rankings. If this is the case, you can find the change in include it in your site.

Conclusion

Web business fluctuates with market changes. Sometimes competition increases and it directly affects ranks of sites. But most of the times, websites face drop in ranking due to technical mistakes they make in the course of SEO. If you are doing SEO of your site then you should take balanced and calculated steps so that your site doesn’t face rank drop due to technical mistakes that you can avoid.