You may have woken up one fine morning to discover that the hard-earned Google ranking of your website has dropped quite a bit. You took a look at the ranking report to discover that your site has disappeared from the top ten of Google and in many cases from the top hundred as well without a trace of it anywhere near the top. Although this sounds scary, you must be in a position to handle the issue. Do not panic due to the drop in dental ranking, just be ready to fix things that resulted in the ranking drop for your site. Here are the reasons for a ranking drop.
Search engine penalties imposed by humans: Human reviewers are working at Google and they take manual actions if it is envisaged that some pages of your website are not in compliance with the webmaster quality guidelines of Google. Although there are many reasons why these penalties are imposed by Google the most common ones are,
- Your website is hacked.
- The website contains spam generated by users.
- The site has unnatural backlinks.
- There is thin content on the website.
- Cloaking.
You can find out more about the manual actions imposed by Google online and also about how to deal with the problem.
Google update in algorithms: There are two ways in which a Google update hits the website ranking. First is that a new algorithm is released by Google or a significant update of the older algorithm. Secondly, this could be just one of the ongoing refreshes of the established algorithms. Although now the Panda and Penguin algorithms of Google have become a part of the core algorithms of search engines, you must be awake to the possibility of major updates. It doesn’t matter what is your business type and your niche. You need to concentrate on search intent. Pick the significant keywords and build quality content and links to provide a terrific user experience.
Competitors are outranking you on Google: There may be nothing wrong with the site apart from the fact that your competitors are getting better. Although the competitor activity rarely results in a dramatic drop in your search engine rankings on Google, it is worth investigating. This is true especially when your website has dropped a few positions on the board. If the competitors have outranked your website for a large number of keywords, they have implemented some website-wide enhancements in all probability. Use a site-auditor in this case for running their website and check out if the competitor site outranks your site in various parameters such as technical optimization and backlink profile.
Loss of backlinks: You will be aware that getting low-quality new backlinks can affect your performance in Google searches. But, a loss of high-quality backlinks can also cause a drop in SERPs. If you wish to check whether lost backlinks are the reason behind the dental ranking drop, use the online tools available to check the backlink history. It will allow you to assess the situation with backlinks and verify if there are any critical losses. This is one of the main reasons why you need to monitor the link profile constantly. It is beneficial to know immediately if a link has been removed.
Website changes: Sometimes you are required to make alterations to your website such as changing the CMS, redesigning it, or just moving the website to HTTPS. All this is guaranteed to mess up your dental ranking. Even a small oversight is likely to cause serious consequences on your SEO performance. It also results in a measurable ranking drop. Keep in mind that Google logs and describes the crawling and indexing issues therefore, it is pretty simple to identify the problem and fix it. You can use an online auditor together with the Search Console for verifying the HTTPS problems, redirect chains, 4XX pages, and a range of technical issues resulting from changes in the site.
Changes in user behavior: Google representatives on many occasions have said that the behavioral metrics are just too noisy to have any effect on the Google rankings. However, several real-life experiments and several search patents have indicated otherwise. Therefore, it may be controversial but there is every chance that a ranking drop might be explained by finding a drop in the click-through rate. You can check this out by using Google’s Search Console. You can also try Google Ads but, set up a few experiments with it. Use testing variations with organic snippets and find out the ones that are successful for the clicks.
Mobile-oriented indexing: Search engines these days are quite keen on making the internet friendly for mobiles. When you are considering the Google dental rankings you will find that the sites that are friendly with mobile phones are prioritized a lot more. However, there is no need for panic. This doesn’t mean that the websites using desktops are not participating in this SEO game. It is significant to note that if you miss out on preparing a mobile-friendly version of your website, you may have to face a dental ranking drop and decreased traffic. It is possible that one of your competitors has optimized his website for mobile devices and this has caused his site to outrank yours, especially on mobile devices.
Keep in mind that there is nothing abnormal if there is a swing in traffic and be calm. While dealing with a drop in SEO traffic and ranking drops, the most important thing you have to check again is data accuracy. Ensure that you are not using incorrect data especially in the case of a certain time, page type, or device. However, the good thing is that these disappearances are simple to locate and they can be prevented in the future. If you are looking for SEO experts in the field of dental practice in the Clearwater, FL area get in touch with Affordable Dental SEO for advice in dealing with these issues.