What to do when your rankings drop: a checklist before you blame the agency

Check in this order. Does your tracking still work? Can Google still read the site? What changed just before the drop? Is this the season for it? What did your competitors do? Only then ask whether the agency or an update is to blame. A "ranking drop" can turn out to be a broken tag, a blocked page or a normal seasonal dip, so rule those out first.

First, find out whether anything actually fell

Open your enquiry register, not the traffic chart. If calls and forms are at their usual level, the chart is probably the problem. A tag lost in a redesign can do it. So can a consent banner that now blocks analytics. Traffic vanishes from the report while real people keep visiting.

Write down three numbers for the four weeks before the drop and the four weeks after: visits from search, enquiries by source, and the number of searches you appear for in the search reports your site owner can open. If only the first one fell, move to step two. If all three fell on the same day, move faster.

The seven checks, in order

Do these in order. Stop when you find a cause, fix it and then watch for two weeks.

1. Tracking. Is the analytics tag on every page? Test one page on your phone. Check the date the report starts to look odd against the last time anyone edited the site.
2. Can Google see the site? Open your site's robots file in a browser (add /robots.txt to the address). If it says to disallow everything, that is your answer. Also check whether a page has a "noindex" instruction; a developer's staging setting sometimes goes live by mistake.
3. Is the site up and fast? An outage of a day, a new host or a certificate that expired can all cost visits. Load three key pages on mobile data.
4. What changed? List every change in the three weeks before the fall: a redesign, new plugin, URL change, new hosting, deleted pages, edited titles. A drop that follows a change closely points to that change.
5. Redirects. If addresses changed, check that the old ones point to the right new page. A page that now says "not found" has lost the standing it earned.
6. Season and market. Compare with the same weeks a year ago, not with last month. Many trades are quiet in the monsoon or after a festival. If your own records show last year's dip at this time, relax.
7. Competitors. Search your main phrases on a phone in a private window. Did a rival add pages, change titles, get listed above you? Note it; you cannot undo it, but it tells you where to spend effort.

Where each cause points

A carpet exporter in Bhadohi

An invented example. A carpet exporter in Bhadohi sees enquiries fall by half within a fortnight of a new site going live. The agency says a Google update has hit rankings, and the exporter starts looking for another agency.

A cousin who knows websites opens the robots file first. It still carries the instruction the developer used while the new site was being built, telling Google to index nothing. The old product pages had been sent to the home page, and the new ones were hidden from search.

There was no update to blame. The launch checklist simply had no line for it. The developer removed the instruction and redirected each old product address to its new page. Enquiries recover over the following weeks, though not fully: about a month of enquiries is lost, and a few old product pages never regain their earlier place. The exporter keeps the agency and adds one line to the launch checklist: before the new site goes live, confirm that nothing blocks it.

What the owner should ask for

Whoever manages your site, ask for these four things before accepting any explanation.

• A dated list of changes made in the last two months.
• View access to your analytics and search report accounts in your own name.
• The list of pages that were removed or renamed.
• The date the dip began, with the report that shows it.

If none of these exist, the problem is the lack of records. Agree what gets recorded before the next change, not after the next drop. The post on why a website is not ranking covers the longer-standing causes.

A worked line for your notes, in the exporter's case: "12 Oct: enquiries from search down from 12 to 6 over four weeks; robots file blocks all pages since the launch on 28 Sep; developer asked to remove it, 14 Oct; redirects for 40 old product pages sent the same day." A line like that, with dates, is what lets you tell an agency or a developer exactly what happened, and it settles who should fix what.

When the checks find nothing

Sometimes every item clears and enquiries are still lower. Then the honest conclusion is that your pages are less useful than a rival's, or that demand moved. That is a slower repair: improve the pages that matter and measure enquiries for a full season. It is also a case where how long SEO takes matters more than a dashboard.

Check the register, then the robots file

Pull up your enquiry register and write the four-week figures before and after the dip. Then check the robots file on your phone. Search traffic is one stream into your wider marketing, and the register shows whether the stream really dried up. If you want the rest of the list done by someone who reads these reports, see technical SEO, or tell us what you need.