What to do when your position drops

Actions to take if your web traffic suddenly dries up

If your web-based business relies on search engines to bring you new customers, then what do ou do if that search engine generated traffic suddenly dries up.

The first thing to do is understand the true nature of the problem.

You may not have dropped in the rankings at all. Double check that you are still looking on the same site (hint: Google.com and Google.co.uk display different results).

Take a look at your stats package and see whether it is all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) that are no longer sending you as many visitors or just one of them?

Obviously you will need to have had some sort tracking software running, but most web hosts include this as standard. If yours doesn't, go to Google and sign up with their 'analytics' service as soon as possible.

If your visits from all search engines have dropped from thousands a day to close to zero, there is a good possibility that your site has changed in a fundamental way that the search engines do not like. Talk to your technical staff about what has happened and get them to resolve the problem

Is the problem across all key phrases or just some of them? If the problem is just on some key phrases then it is more likely to be 'off-the-page factors' that are causing you this problem.Google in particular looks at the number of other sites that link to you and the words they use in the link to determine where in their rankings your site will appear.

If lots of sites (or just a few 'top sites' with a high Page Rank) have turned off their links to you, you will drop in the rankings. Conversely, if a competitor has suddenly done lots of work to get higher than you in the rankings, then they will take your potential customers away.

In this case the only option is to fight back, by doing some more optimisation yourself. However, it may not be a costly task to fix things. By choosing to optimise on keywords with the best ratio of visitors to competitors (keyword effectiveness index) you can give yourself a significant boost where it will have the biggest benefit.

Read more articles or subscribe to our rss feed