The goal of every business is to increase sales and make more profit by growing its customer sales. One of the best ways to increase sales is to drive traffic to your website using blog, promotions and special offers through SEO.
If your website ranks high on search engine results pages like Google, you should be getting more traffic that will help you convert potential customers. But, just like everything else, competition in SEO is a factor. There are other businesses just like yours who is trying to rank high on SERPs. So, your website might drop in ranking and you’ll begin to lose your traffic.
You’re probably thinking, why would my search ranking drop then? Well, here are 5 reasons why your Google ranking might suddenly drop on SERPs:
1. Server Issues
If you have server issues and fail to fix them as early as possible, there may be a broken caching function or an empty markup sent to Google bot. This will affect the ranking of your site over time. Use Google’s Fetch and Render tool to test the condition of your website and see how Google bot crawls your site to fix any issues there may be existing.
2. Server Overload
If your website’s server is not prepared to handle a sudden increase in traffic, it will become overloaded and collapse. If they happen frequently, your site will continue to drop in search ranking. You can avoid this scenario by not hosting your site on a shared server. A host server crash will make your site inaccessible and will affect your ranking. Upgrade your site’s bandwidth to the range that can accommodate your expected traffic.
3. Penalties
If your site is penalized, it will undoubtedly drop in search ranking. If you notice a sudden and sharp drop in your site ranking on Google, and your site still ranks high on other search engines that means that Google has penalized your website. Check your Google Search Console account for notifications for the violations that resulted in the penalty. However, bad quality links like using unhealthy, spamming, and outdated link building strategies will get your website penalized with a resultant drop in search ranking.
4. Sudden Drop in Click-Through Rate
Google focuses on user experience, and it is an essential factor in ranking websites. As a result, if there is a sudden drop in your CTRs, that can indicate that your site has specific issues that cause poor user experience. Based on this, your website will start to drop in search ranking.
5. False Meta Information
The Meta description of a website is crucial to its search ranking. Meta description and Meta tags hint the search engines what a website is about. However, if discovered that the Meta description provided is false or not consistent with the website’s true state, it can affect the website negatively. Ensure that your Meta information is consistent with the content on your website.
