Is Your Website’s SEO Slipping? 4 Common Reasons For a SERP Slipup

Sometimes, you have a website and it seems to be doing quite well in the SERPs (that’s Search Engine Results Pages) — and then suddenly, it isn’t anymore. Why does that happen? Can you do anything about it?

Usually, yes, you can do something about it — but it depends on the answer to the first question: why did it happen? Here are the four most common reasons why a website slipped down the SERPs:

• A competitor out-SEOed you.
• Your shine wore off.
• Someone hates you.
• Google’s algorithm changed.

A Competitor Out-SEOed You
This is pretty straightforward: at some point in the recent past, someone who wants to dominate a keyword either has a better SEO company (not likely) or a bigger budget (much more probable), and they decided they were going to kick you off the top spot. If you’ve only dropped one or two spots in the rankings, this is the culprit a goodly portion of the time.

Your shine wore off.
All of the search engines give ‘bonus points’ to sites with new content. That boost can be enough to keep you on the first page if you keep adding new, valuable content. If your site did well for 6-9 months and then suddenly dropped a full page or so in rank, this is probably the issue — add new content to get your shine back.

Someone hates you.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to attack a website and kill it. All it takes these days is for someone to copy your content, change a few words, and put that content on a page full of porn spam, and then link back to your page. All the sudden it looks like you’re desperate for backlinks and restorting to porn spam to get them…which will kill your rep with Google no matter how good the rest of your organic SEO is.

Google’s algorithm changed.
This is a surefire sign that your websites’ SEO practices need cleaning up. If you’re creating legitimate, clean, strong links — or better yet, getting them naturally by consistently posting awesome content — this shouldn’t ever be an issue. But if you have iffy or even ‘light grey hat’ SEO, you can count on, one day, Google deciding that it doesn’t like you anymore.