What will you do when seeing the rank and traffic are dropping?

[JonnyGreenwood]

No black-hat SEO strategy was adopted, so we suppose it's not a penalty, but ranks and organic traffics are dropping.

What will you do in this situation?

And how long it takes for you to make sure it's not a normal flux, but something wrong happens on your site?

Thanks in advance

[JonnyGreenwood]

Wow Ed, what an answer.

I pretty much agree with "are you selling less, do you have less subscriptions, are you getting less enquiries ?". Yes that's the real goal of our sites, not just traffic and ranks.

Thanks again for you reply.

I am gonna keep watching the site's performance and keep discussing.  

[EdsonGroupMedia]

Hi Jonny,

The first question you should ask yourself is, what do you consider to be an unnatural fluctuation of rank for your keyphrases ?

I have found myself in the same situation / mindframe before, time and time again...from my experience and by no means is it out of this planet, I have found that Google naturally fluctuates positions and placement...one day I could be 1 next day 2, 3, 9, 2, and so on. (ps its a bad habit to check every day...I have taught myself that this is a wasteful way to spend valuable time)

At first it was a concern; however I quickly learnt that the my reality and goals were a little unrealistic, I can't expect to stay no.1 for the rest of my days, truth be told it really shouldn't make a difference if your marketing strategy is solid...at the end of the day and looking forward to the future (when the machines take over) great content, social presence and relevance is going to keep you ahead of the pack!!

To answer your question; (What would I Do, AKA, what would I have done back then)

I would have gone back to basics, check;

1. duplicate content

2. duplicate page titles

3, broken links

4. internal anchor text linking etc, etc

Depending on the type of website you have that are great resources to check some of the basics e.g Wordpress has a great free tool to check most of the above points http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/

You mentioned your traffic has dropped ?? this 1. may be a aftereffect of the rank drop, 2. you should also take a look at your historical data... e.g my campaigns will always drop in traffic when I drop my social media presence or when I slow down my blog post, I would take a look and see if there is any patterns with your activity and your traffic.

So the big question when would I!! start worrying, when it affects my goals... are you selling less, do you have less subscriptions, are you getting less enquiries ? (it also depends on the time frame and rank drop

well I hoped this helped, once again I am new to the game and by know means a pro and I would love to hear what others have to say.

Thanks

Eddie