Global Elix 
What have you done wrong? What happened to your website? These are some questions you might ask yourself if you see your search engine rank sinking.
Your website has been doing great, but it’s now losing a good position in search engine results pages (SERP). This scenario is common among startup websites, especially those without a solid search engine optimization (SEO) plan.
Losing your SERP spot is critical. It can jeopardize your website traffic, conversion rate, sales, and visibility on search engines. Hence, it’s similar to not having any website because only a few people can access and engage with your brand. So, what can you do for your website to recover from this struggle?
In this article, you’ll learn how your website can recover from losing its SERP spot to boost your online reach and overall business:
- Conduct An SEO Testing
The first step towards SEO recovery is testing. Your business can’t afford to lose your SERP spot, especially if you have already invested so much time, effort, and money.
If you experience the same website problem, it’s high time to run SEO testing and find out where you’ve lost your SERP grasp. This step is crucial to boosting your website’s SEO performance, directly affecting your online presence, potential customers, and overall sales.
Even though you have an idea of your website’s problem, conducting SEO split testing using proper techniques is crucial. SEO professionals usually perform testing because it requires the ideal environment and tools to gather and measure data.
- Check And Revamp Content
Content is king. But poor content doesn’t deserve the throne. One of the reasons websites are losing a good SERP spot is poor content quality. Many website owners outsource articles or blog writing from several freelance writers.
Sometimes, website managers fail to edit articles and publish them online. There’s nothing wrong with it if you have top-caliber writers on your content team. However, you might sacrifice content quality if you hire different writers without stringent editorial requirements.
With that, here’s how to check the quality of your web page content:
- Check For Technical Errors
Check the recently published articles on your website. Find out any spelling or grammatical errors. You can use checker tools for this task.
- Check For Relevance
Review the content under headings and subheadings. Are they relevant? If not, this issue might also affect how search bots understand and rank that specific web page.
- Check The Keywords
Now, it’s time to focus on the keywords. Do you have a good combination of main and secondary keywords? How about the presence of long-tail keywords? Long-tail keywords are highly relevant and specific words or phrases describing your target content goal.
- Get Rid Of Duplicate Content
Most people get confused about who’s who when talking to twins. The same is true with search engines. Search bots get confused when encountering duplicate content on a website. Because of the confusion, search engines choose whichever among the two, regardless of whether the selected page is the better version.
How can you resolve duplicate content issues? Search engines get snippets or a few lines from your content and show them as page descriptions on SERPs. Therefore, maintaining uniqueness is the key to answering this problem by:
- Use Unique Page Title And Descriptions
First, ensure that each web page on your website has a custom page title and description in the page’s HTML code. Use unique subheadings. If you can’t do this, it’s best to eliminate the page entirely.
- Use Unique Product Descriptions
If you’re selling a product found on other websites, it’s a must to customize your product descriptions instead of copying what others have. The more originality you put on your product descriptions, the more search engines will notice and rank it higher on SERP.
- Report External Duplicate Content
Because websites are open to everyone who wants to access them, some of your competitors might also look into your high-performing content and copy or rewrite them. You can report this scraped content incident to search engines if you suspect this web spam problem is happening to your website.
- Change Stock Images To Original
Many websites have the same images with similar descriptions and credit sources. Those generic images only show SEO bots that your website doesn’t have originality. It’s like saying that you don’t deserve a higher search engine ranking because you put too little effort into creating your web pages.
Eliminate stock images and replace them with original ones. That way, you can take clear photos relevant to your content. This strategy can attract the attention of search engines, showing them that you put so much effort into providing good quality, original images for your audience.
Don’t forget to include relevant keywords on the image descriptions to rank high in search engines. Use appropriate image tags that link to your website.
For instance, you can insert alt tags with relevant keywords ‘Fashionable Sandals for Summer!’ to a photo of ladies’ sandals. In that way, search engines can quickly determine what the image is all about.
- Empower Your Links
Most businesses have blogs because they want to generate content and links to build an audience. Establishing a good online audience base can boost business sales significantly. So, it’s not surprising to find brick-and-mortar businesses building their online presence in the modern digital area.
But even if you have tons of articles, a lack of an excellent link-building strategy can make your SERP rank unstable. Therefore, it’s high time to review and empower your links before your website suffers a major downfall.
The content of your links talks so much about what your web page intends to impart to online users. Search bots also consider links in ranking your web pages in search results. They want to ensure that your links are relevant and useful to your visitors.
Here’s how you can empower your links to help your website recover from a declining SERP ranking:
- Build Your Backlinks
Backlinks are also called incoming or inbound links. You earn a backlink when your web page’s URL is on another website. Search engines consider backlinks as votes to land a high spot in SERP.
If you want your website to increase ranking quickly, link building is one of the best ways. It requires collaboration with other websites. And you can use online SEO tools to check what websites are linking to your competitors. In that way, you can contact them and request writing a guest post or any way to link your website to theirs.
- Optimize Your Internal Links
Ensure your web pages are optimized to recover from a low-lying SERP rank. Aside from choosing the right main and secondary keywords to optimize your website, it’s important to know the internal links that drive you the most traffic.
Internal links are those you embed to your web pages that also come from your website. They’re essential to search engines and online users, telling them more information about your content.
You can use a website crawler tool to help improve your onsite SEO. This tool extracts and audit data for SEO issues. If you want to find out the number of internal links online visitors clicked, use this tool to obtain an accurate result. By doing so, you’ll have an idea of what content type visitors want to read on your website to help boost your content strategy.
- Level Up Your Domain Authority
If you’re an avid mobile gamer, you know how important leveling up is to boost your character’s power. The same concept applies to the SEO world. In SEO, search engines are the battleground. Therefore, you must equip your website with the right tools and tactics to level your domain authority.
Moz developed a search engine ranking score called domain authority (DA), which predicts how likely a website ranks in SERP. The higher your website’s DA is, the more likely it will rank higher in SERP and obtain more organic traffic.
Page authority (PA) is somehow similar to DA. However, DA looks into the website’s entire performance, whereas PA focuses on individual web pages. Generally, websites with many high authority pages also have higher DA scores.
Aside from improving your link profile, check these tips to level up your domain authority:
- Improve Your Technical SEO
Migrate your site to a secure URL (HTTPS) and ensure search engine bots can crawl your website problem-free by checking your robots.txt settings. Optimizing your XML sitemap and adding structured data can help search engines better understand your web content context.
- Create A Speedy Mobile-Friendly Website
Because most online users search using mobile devices, it’s a must to make every website mobile-friendly to rank high in SERP. You can work with a web design and development professional to ensure you have a fast, mobile-friendly website.
Conclusion
Recovery from a failing SEO ranking requires conducting SEO testing to assess your website’s performance. Once you have determined your website’s weak links, you can find concrete solutions to earn your SERP spot back. SEO can be complex and technical. But taking small steps and asking for professional help can go a long way to attaining your website goals.
