Noticed a sudden drop in your website’s organic traffic and rankings? You need a website rankings loss audit. Find out how our detailed SEO review can help you properly diagnose the issue and improve your search rankings.
What Causes Websites to Drop in Rankings and Organic Traffic?
Before we delve deeper in our website audit process, let’s try and understand WHY your website’s search engine visibility is declining at a rapid pace:
- Seasonal traffic – in some cases your organic traffic will dwindle just because people are not interested in your services/products at this exact date (Christmas decorations, summer jeep rentals etc.). If you are off-season, so is your organic traffic.
- Manual penalty – you’ve done something to “anger” Google and you got hit by a manual penalty: low-quality links (bad backlink profile or selling links from your website), thin-content penalty (too many empty or copied content pieces on your website) etc. Anytime you tried to trick the algorithm a little, you might get a penalty. In this case, you can either get de-ranked from page 1 or, worse, de-indexed from Google.
- Algorithmic penalty – every few months Google release an algorithm update, which can affect negatively a wide range of websites (YMYL – Your Money or Your Life, which hit a lot of health and finance related websites, Google Product Reviews Update – which hit a lot of affiliate websites etc.). We also had Penguin and Panda, to name other 2 famous algo’ updates.
- Serious technical SEO issues – website was hacked into, server issues, indexation problems etc.
- Competitors are getting better at SEO – you are not running a marathon alone, in the search rankings, if your competitors are upping their search engine optimization game, you will see a drop in your search engine rankings.
How Does Our Website Rankings Loss Audit Address These Issues
I keep on comparing SEO audits to going to the doctor, because there are many similarities: we do an extensive checkup, with our SEO tools, and, just like patients, many of our clients order an SEO audit when their website is “sick”.
While regular SEO audits are a great idea, to keep your website in good shape, we usually get so caught up in our day-to-day work, that we forget to re-analyze the website. And then, after a while, despite our best efforts, the website is losing organic traffic and we realize there’s something wrong.
When this happens, the first step in recover is an SEO audit.
Manual Penalty SEO Audit
The easiest to notice: manual penalties usually come with a pretty steep decline in search traffic and, even more helpful, a notice in your Google Search Console.
The problem is that, in most cases, you will not know exactly what ‘hit’ you, as the guidelines are pretty general.
Some possible reasons:
- Unnatural links
- Thin content
- Hacked website
- Pure spam or user-generated spam
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or keyword stuffing
How Can SEO AUDIT PROS Help?
We’ll peform a detailed SEO audit, to understand clearly what triggered the manual penalty. We had clients with many bad links (they took their backlinking a little too far), but also clients who sold links and got a manual penalty.
By doing a link audit, together with the technical review and full scan, we can understand the issues and give you the exact solution to improve.
Algorithmic Penalty SEO Audit
Your website wasn’t directly penalized by a person (just like with a manual penalty), but a change in the algorithm made you lose position.
We had clients in the medical niche, who were hit by the “Medic Update”, we had affiliate website owners, who lost organic traffic after the Google Product Reviews Update, clients whose websites got penalized for poor user experience, low content quality and after failing the mobile-friendly test.
As the algorithm changes constantly, what you did correctly one year ago, can now get you de-ranked, hence the need to keep your website in top shape and audit its performances on a regular basis.
SEO Audit to Fix Serious Technical Errors
If your website wasn’t hit by an algorithm update or manual penalty, any technical issues can still get it off page 1.
Duplicate content, indexation errors, bad URL structure, lack of well-optimized internal links, high bounce rates or a redesign process that is not going too well … all these can make your website experience a steep organic traffic drop.
Our SEO audit service covers ALL these technical aspects as well:
- status codes review
- link profile audit (both internal and external)
- search query audits
- content management review
- XML sitemap scan and audit
- Google Analytics and Google Search Console audit
- full website scan.
There are factors you cannot influence right away, such as domain authority, as you shouldn’t embark in a very aggressive backlinks campaign, for instance, but we were able to provide our clients with a lot of “quick wins” and pretty steep increase in search engine traffic, just by properly auditing the website and giving them the exact recipe to improve FAST and EFFECTIVELY.
We focus at first on indexation issues: if the search engines cannot properly view/index your website, just writing thousands of blog posts, however optimized, is useless, as they will not be picked up in the indexed. Canonicalization issues, 404 errors, badly configured robots.txt files – we have seen it all in our audits.
As soon as we discovered these issues and we repaired them, the clients’ websites soared in the SERPS. Sometimes over-night.
When we started providing the search engine crawlers with easy to index content, traffic increased.
Once these changes were out of the way, we could focus on proper meta tags optimization, image SEO, a more effective keyword research and mapping.
If your foundation is strong (website is not sporting any errors anymore), building optimized content, getting some high-quality backlinks and ongoing promotion will add up to this already sturdy base.
Competitor Analysis and Audit
As much as we’d like to, we are not alone in the search engine rankings race.
We have worked with remote location clients, who were almost alone in their area and niche, which makes our SEO easier (and cheaper for them), but we are also working with high-competition areas and industries.
It’s pretty different to be a web designer in Sussex, NJ, for instance, or a car accident doctor in NYC.
While the web designer in a more rural area can get away with a simple website and not worry too much about aggressive optimization, there are thousands of car accident doctors in the Big Apple, all competing in the same geographical area and niche.
Either way, our detailed SEO audit includes a thorough competitor analysis section, as this allows our client to understand their market better, see what competitors are doing well and where we can find gaps in their marketing for us to succeed.
So, Do You Need a Website Rankings Loss Audit?
If you do see a drop in search engine traffic, by all means, we need to see what caused it and help you recover. We had some pretty good results with clients who were hit by algorithmic penalties, by manual penalties or just saw a drop in traffic, after purchasing websites from other webmasters.
Even if your website is steadily growing, you should audit it at least 2 times/year, to make sure it does move into the right direction. Malware, server issues or plugins that stop working, all can influence your rankings, even if you don’t see the damage first hand.
