The entire web development processes in some cases leads to loss of keywords and data. Although recovery can take place most of the time after following specific methods like advanced recovery tools and methodologies.
If you find your website ranking going downwards for no obvious reason then corrective steps must be taken to restore it. There are different ways to get it fixed but one of the most important is to accurately identify the keywords or the pages going down.
To effectively complete this task, you must understand as what keywords are driving traffic and how it is affecting the overall website ratings. A drop by a single keyword sometimes gives a major setback.
Key Tools for Rescue
Google Console Search and Google Analytics are the two key tools to use in such situations.
Start with Acquisition tab and go to Overview and Organic Search. Choose the Landing Page and then select the Conversion item from the drop-down list that comes up at this time. After reset to the Secondary Dimension to Acquisition and Source then filter can be applied by Google in a simple way.
To get success in this task, you must have an idea on when you lost the keywords. This can also be done by choosing a comparison period option.
After doing this, go to Google Search Console and then to Performance and Pages. Just enter the date range to get keyword list and date when it started ranking on Google. You can easily find conversion and traffic gains and losses records here. Same process can be followed in Google Analytics also.
Proper Diagnosis of The Problem
After completing the critical analysis, start diagnosing the problem. It is very important to find out as what have caused the pages to fall and why the keywords were lost. Early identification of the exact cause minimize the future hassles.
A proper diagnosis on the lost keywords can’t be done easily and some of the guidelines act as a starting point. Getting answers to few questions helps to do it properly.
What was the source of traffic?
Is content appealing or not?
Any previous attack launched by any of the links on the website?
What are the other keywords driving traffic?
In some cases, website hacking also becomes one of the reason of losing keywords and pages. The use of poor link building strategies also poses threat to keyword loss. A well measured approach can save the website security and web pages adversely.
Migration to New Server
Moving to a new server also leads to loss of keywords and pages. Whenever any structural changes are made to your website then it should have a proper redirect plan. Proper updation of links, XML sitemaps and tags must be done to prevent any drop in rankings. Always remember search engines will index your old and new websites. Lack of redirect plan might penalize you for duplicate content.
Other Reasons
It is not necessary that rankings are affected by the above given reasons only as it could be another reason linked with the website. Sometimes, Google make certain amendments to the search engine results depending upon the behavior of the user on specific areas. This also affect your rankings.