Have you spotted a loss of positions on Google on main or secondary keywords? It is important to understand where this drop in visibility on the SERP is coming from in order to take the right measures! Even if these fluctuations are completely natural, if all your pages are falling, it means that the competition is fiercer or that your website is no longer as well optimized as before or that the search engine algorithm has exchange. A proactive approach makes it possible to limit this risk and this is what our SEO agency will explain to you in this article.
1. The BABA: is your site accessible?
A loss of position can simply indicate a problem accessing your website or a specific page of your website. To do this, you can go through Google Search Console or a tool like HTTP Status Code Checker.
- Status Code 200: no problem finding your page
- Error 404 (page not found) or Error 410 (page permanently unavailable)
- Error 500 (Server Problem): in this case we invite you to contact your host.
IS YOUR ROBOTS.TXT FILE PREVENTING A SITE FROM BEING CRAWLED?
The Robots.txt file is very interesting for referencing a site: it allows you to add exclusion pages for robots. The robot’s crawl will not jump to the page(s) you want it to avoid. Could you have added pages to exclude that impact your SEO for Interior Designers?
If your URLs are excluded, you risk losing the indexing of your pages in google results.
2. Are the basics of SEO respected?
Impossible to keep a good positioning without respecting the basics of SEO. Indeed, Google penalizes pages that do not meet its standards. It is essential to check the following points:
Page title and meta descriptions: increases the click-through rate (CTR) and therefore improves natural referencing. Be concise, effective and arouse desire (with action verbs). Our advice in the article on the perfect title tags and meta descriptions.
The title tags of your page – Our advice in the article on optimizing title tags
The loading speed of your website pages
The mobile compatibility of your site – Google results on mobile phones and tablets are different from PC results. If your site is not optimized you risk not positioning yourself and thus losing positions in search engines. We invite you to check our article to optimize the SEO of your mobile site.
3. Trust Google tools: Search Console and Google Analytics
It is Google that chooses to have your site appear in first position or even in “position 0” or on the second page… It is therefore interesting to know how Google judges your site and which criteria do not respect the standard, the ideal for the search engine.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that provides you with a lot of detailed information on the visibility of a website. We will focus more particularly on the error report: Exploration > Exploration report. You can see the navigation problems encountered by the robot that crawled the website. You can also submit a sitemap.
Tip: Create alerts, in case of problems you will be notified quickly.
In the event of a manual sanction from Google, you will be alerted automatically via your Google Search Console space.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is the other important tool of Google. It provides you with essential information about your website traffic and the behavior of visitors to the site. It is necessary to detect if pages have suffered a big drop in traffic: page, pages per session and the bounce rate take priority. Changes to your site may have negatively influenced its statistics, the natural referencing of your site and therefore your positions on the SERP.
4. Check your website content
As mentioned above, the content of your website can negatively influence the positioning of your web pages. The quality of the content is a very important positioning criterion. You need to focus on this before losing positions irrevocably.
Bad, low-quality content leads to abandonment and less traffic to your site. For Google, this is a negative signal and can cause you to lose positions. Do not duplicate content from another site or your own site, work on content and form and update old articles to maintain a good appeal.
It is important to keep your site up to date so that the Google robot can visit it regularly and thus update your positioning.
5. Do you have good backlinking?
Backlinks have become a “must have” for a website with good positioning. A fall in Google positions can be a sign of backlinking that is losing quality or that is no longer provided enough. You can also face negative SEO, that is to say a malicious action on the part of another website to make you lose authority. The Majestic SEO tool is the most comprehensive tool for backlinking.
You can also request the deletion of your “bad” backlinks directly on the publisher sites. You also have the possibility via Google Search Console to request the disavowal of these links.
Learn more about Net linking and how to get good backlinks.
As you will have understood, there are many reasons why the positions of your website can be lost. Follow the various points listed in this article and the various expert advice on the blog. Not only will you be able to recover your positions but perhaps improve them quite simply. Questions? A new project? Contact us to discuss it with the Professional SEO experts at 1ere Position.