Reasons Your SEO Rankings Dropped And What To Do About It
You're tracking the wrong rankings.
In recent years there has been a shift toward "natural language" when it comes to searches, that is, people typing, or increasingly speaking, complete sentences into search engines, rather than just a few keywords. If you're only tracking generic keywords, it might be that your keyword strategy is outdated. The people who are looking for you are using new keywords or phrases, and you need to update your keyword strategy.
The Google "dance".
It's normal for rankings to fluctuate. Not just from one day to the next, but from one computer to another, one location to another, and based on a host of other variables. Google is constantly testing every variable it can detect by changing search results. This is part of why it's counter productive to focus too heavily on specific rankings.
New website.
If you launch a new design for an existing website you can expect your rankings to drop, regardless of what you do to prepare for that launch, and regardless of how much better the new website is, in terms of SEO, than the old one.
New website no longer.
You launched a redesigned website to replace an old one and the rankings went down, then came back up quickly, even higher than they were before, and now they've gone back down slightly. Or you launched a brand new website, and after a few weeks your website shot to the top of the rankings, and then dropped back down-a lot.
Low quality links.
Many companies made the mistake a few years ago of succumbing to an offer of thousands of links for a low price. Now, with various updates made by the search engines to stop what they see as "search engine spamming," websites with large quantities of low quality links pointing to them are seeing their rankings drop or disappear entirely.
Losing good links.
A drop in rankings might be due to losing high quality links. Perhaps those websites or webpages disappeared, or the link to your website was removed. Whatever the cause, the solution is to continually be building high quality links.
Bad hosting.
Switch to a low quality hosting company, or a company whose data center isn't in the ideal place to provide fast page loads for your site visitors, and you can end up with user behavior on your site that tells search engines they should rank other websites before yours.
