Here’s What You Should Do If Your Search Rankings Just Dropped

If you’ve ever done SEO, you know how good it feels to see your rankings go up.

You put a ton of hard work into moving up in the SERPs and it finally pays off.

But then the unexpected happens. Your rankings drop.

Few things in SEO are more discouraging than a fall in the rankings. It makes you feel like everything you did was useless.

You wonder what went wrong or if you made a mistake. You beat yourself up for not doing it right.

You’re back to square one again, and you have to start all over.

Or do you?

In my experience, that’s not always the case.

My rankings have dropped more times than I can count. At first, I panicked.

As I learned more, I found out that it’s not the end of the world if you go down a position or two. It’s obviously not ideal, but there’s a lot you can do to fix it.

That’s what I’m going to show you today. Even if your rankings are where you want them to be, you need to be aware of how to bring them back up if (or when) they drop.

Analyze the drop

Before you take action to raise your rankings, you need to get some hard data about your ranking drop.

First, you need to figure out just how far you’ve dropped. (And if you’re not regularly checking your ranking, you need to do that.)

I’ll use one of my articles as an example. (This article didn’t lose ranking, but we’ll pretend that it did for argument’s sake.)

The keyword we’ll look at is “long form content.”

As of this writing, a Google search shows that my article is apparently at position 5.

I need to focus on the first four:

The goal is to figure out why my page is ranking lower than these ones.

But you can’t blindly trust a Google search. Instead, use a tool like serps.com to get empirical data about your current ranking.

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