I've ruined my website's SEO performance, what now?

You log in to your preferred reporting software and everything is down, performance has tanked and you have no idea why. This is a stressful situation for anyone who is responsible for website performance. Visions of a promotion go up in smoke and your next 1:1 is unlikely to be the back patting session you hoped it would be. But all is not lost.

Sometimes being in this situation can be very daunting, and knowing where to start can be confusing. That is why we’ve created this guide: to identify the steps you can take to help define the issue and work to resolve it. 

Is your tracking working?

The first thing to do is to check your analytics / GSC / rank tracker working properly. There are various methods to set up your tracking for various tools, so we won't go into detail here. The most common issues are:

• Missing tracking tags within the page HTML
• If using Tag Manager, rolling back to a previous version
• Incorrectly applied filters within the tool 

Check with whoever set up your tools, make sure they’re working as expected and you are using the correct configuration. 

Did Google do it?

The days of Google giving out manual actions feel like they are long behind us. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t happen. Consider whether you have been up to anything that could be flagged against Google guidelines, such as buying links or anything that violates Google’s spam policies. Log into Google Search Console and check your messages. If Google has taken action against you, it will be flagged. 

Did Google do it (part 2)?

Google is constantly tweaking its ranking algorithms and as such, these changes can impact ranking performance. Check the latest SEO news and see if Google has announced any changes. Any fundamental changes are usually explained but the exception would be Core updates. It’s a good idea to look at algorithm updates and see if they align with your drop in performance.  

Did a colleague do it?

Unless you’re in a very small team it’s likely a number of people have the ability to update the website. It’s possible that a change could’ve been made without your knowledge, not realising that it could impact SEO. For example, completely unrelated website updates can undo previously implemented technical SEO recommendations.

Which pages/keywords are affected?

While overall organic performance is down, the problem might be limited to a handful of pages. Open up your analytics or Google Search Console and review which pages have been impacted. By identifying pages you can quickly focus on the changes that have been made to those pages, which may help to identify the issue. Similarly look at individual keyword rankings. Knowing the keywords that have been impacted is also a great way to hone in on the problem. 

How about technical issues?

If all of the above doesn’t help then it may be  worth digging into the technical capabilities. Check the various reports in Google Search Console to get an understanding of what is broken. The Page Indexing report is great at flagging which pages have and haven’t been indexed. A technical issue may cause a previously indexed page to become unindexable so this is a great tool for highlighting these types of issues. The URL inspection tool is also very useful if you have suspicions about certain pages.

If you have access, using a website crawler such as Screaming Frog is an excellent source of information. While these tools are very useful they can provide an overwhelming amount of data. These tools also unfortunately can't tell you why something is broken which means you can't prevent the problem occurring again.

Could it be another channel?

Another potential cause for a drop in organic traffic could be another marketing channel such as Paid Search. If Paid Search starts to target a keyword that is responsible for a lot of Organic traffic then the Paid Ad is very likely to appear more prominently than the Organic results. As such, users may click on the ad. Check in with your other channels and make sure they haven’t started any activity that may interfere with your SEO efforts. 

So I know what the problem is, what next?

Generally the approach falls into one of two categories:

1. Fix the thing! If you know how to resolve the problem then just get on and do it. The faster the issue is resolved then the faster performance should return.
2. Revert! If you’re not sure how to fix the problem or the fix is going to take a long time to implement, then revert back to the last instance that everything was working ok. This at least allows you to try and stop the downward performance trend while you take care of the fix.

Actually I’ve done everything and I still don’t know what the problem is. What now?

If you still don't know what the problem is or what to do then it might be time to get in touch with Clarity and our SEO experts.

Image from Unsplash and Firmbee