You log in to check your rankings and discover the worst. Overnight rankings have shifted, and you’ve lost the top rankings in Google for your trophy keywords. Here’s the reality: They weren’t “yours” to start with.
In organic search, we can enjoy the benefits of strong rankings over time, but we always have to remember that Google holds all of the cards for rankings on its platform. Google makes the rules, and it doesn’t owe us anything — not rankings, not impressions, not clicks.
You can argue that the producers of great content across the internet feed Google the content it needs to generate rankings, featured snippets, AI Overviews, and more, but that doesn’t mean that Google will give you preferential treatment in the form of evergreen rankings for having produced that great content in the past.
Google (and all search engines) are very much of the “what have you done for me lately” mindset. When you find your rankings and traffic decreasing, it’s best to remember this point first.
And then, get to work.
What to Do When Rankings Decrease
When organic search rankings decrease more than just the usual minor seesawing, there are a couple of steps to take immediately.
- Check Google’s Algorithm Dashboard: Google lists all official algorithm updates on its Google Search Status Dashboard. If you’re in the middle of an algorithm update, don’t make any sudden changes. You don’t know if where you’re ranking this second will be where you’re ranking when the algorithm finishes rolling out. When the update is over and the dust has settled, that’s the time to triage the situation and take evasive action on the pages and keywords affected.
- Check Technical SEO: A sudden performance issue could also be caused by a technical change on your site, such as a meta robots noindex tag, errant canonical tag, or robots.txt disallow being accidentally applied. Check our blog post to learn about the seven technical SEO issues that kill SEO, and look for them on the pages affected.
If neither of these is the culprit, then the answer is harder: You’ll have to do some hardcore competitive content analysis against the specific pages that outrank you now. This is difficult because it’s hard to objectively compare the site and content you’ve worked so hard to create against other sites, especially those you consider longtime rivals.
When analyzing your competitors, look for the following specifically on the pages that improved in the rankings rather than the whole site. These five elements are among the ways that Google recommends “doing the right things right” for organic search. With these elements in mind, look for the ways that your competitors outshine your content.
- Keyword Usage and Related Words: In modern SEO, the rankings don’t necessarily go to the site that uses the keyword the most. Rather, rankings are rewarded to those that use keywords and related words most effectively, anticipating the language that real visitors use, answering their questions, and speaking in their words.
- Quality Content: The words on the page should be easy to read, well-written, free of grammatical errors, and up to date in the knowledge presented. More than that, the content presented should cover the depth of information needed to satisfy the visitor.
- Engaging Content: Since Google potentially uses its Navboost system — which uses Chrome user data to understand engagement — to influence rankings, more engaging content could be part of the secret to success. Try to avoid long, gray paragraphs of text and use headings for ease of scanning and navigation. Add video, audio, useful images or illustrations, bulleted or numbered lists, whatever makes sense to help convey your point and keep the visitor engaged.
- Unique Content: The concept of unique content goes far beyond mere plagiarism or copying and pasting sections of text from other sites. The ideas themselves and the structure of the writing need to be uniquely presented. In other words, it’s not enough to reword sentences in the same order in which they appear in a competitor’s piece. Show your own E-E-A-T within the copy. That goes for product descriptions on ecommerce sites as well as article-based content.
- Helpful Content: Google’s desire for helpful content is so strong that it developed an entire algorithm around the concept designed to promote content that is helpful, reliable, and people-first. Focus on creating content for your audience, not for search engine optimization.
Unfortunately, Google makes the rules and doesn’t communicate them clearly to anyone. You can’t buy organic search rankings; you just have to produce the best site possible and “do the right things right” for your visitors, both in your heart and in Google’s algorithmic eye. With hard work and persistence, and some luck, it is possible to regain lost rankings.
