Suddenly ranking dropped in US: What actions required to retain?

[vtmoz]

Hi Moz community,

Our website has global audience, visitors and clients. Suddenly our website dropped in rankings for main keyword in US; which is our primary targeting country. Not sure why? This is been happening for last 2 months, we waited it to recover and now trying to fix if we can do anything about it. Is there anything wrong with back-links? What might be the factors contributing here for global website?

Thanks

[sergeystefoglo]

Hi,

There could be a variety of things that could have caused this, but I would start by asking a few questions:

1. Did the drop happen quickly? Did it go from positions 1-3 to 20 below in a day or two?
2. Is the SERP volatile? Has there been lots of movement for the SERP historically?
3. Have other sites in your space seen negative drops? I know there has been a lot of movement in the last few weeks.

Some general things I would jump into to start looking:

• Core technical elements.

• Was the page de-indexed somehow?

• Was the page canonicalized elsewhere?

• Did the core on-page elements get re-targeted to another term or removed?

• General health of homepage/site

• Is your backlink profile healthy? Did you ever purchase links/did someone purchase negative links to your domain?

• Is your content scraped or duplicated across other sites?

• Is your website mobile friendly?

• Does your site load quicker than 5 seconds?

• As Nikki mentioned, it's also important to look at who is ranking now.

• What is the DA of their site compared to yours? Is it much higher?

• Is their quality of content better?

If the drop happened quickly it's likely that something technical went wrong or you've been hit with an obvious penalty.

If it's happened over months, it's probably less obvious and could be multiple things.

I know that's not a straight answer, but those are some starting points I could think of with the information provided. Hope that is helpful!

[nhhernandez]

Check the websites of the competitors that outranked you. What's their on page like? Do they have a local presence in the US? Who are linking back to them? Do their sites have a better link profile than yours? Check their estimated traffic per month. Is it higher than yours? You can get the link and traffic data from AHREFS.