It's possible this has happened to you: you get out of bed one morning to find your site has disappeared from the search engine universe, nowhere to be found. Even though it's only dropped a few pages, it may as well be a thousand.
What to do? Scream at your SEO guy? Pop open that Christmas bourbon a wee bit early in the day? Blame it on the President?
Search engine seismic shifts happen, and while you can't control Google, you can take action to minimize the effects such a shuffle in your ranking will have on your business. To help with that we've come up with 5 ways you can make the best of a negative situation.
5 Tips on how to minimize a drop in search rankings
1. Have a site and rankings monitor in place – It's a very good idea to have your site's search engine position monitored, so you can not only see when there is a big problem, but also the trends that are taking place all the time with your rankings. There is no substitute for this kind of intelligence.
2. Plug into social media more – There is a vast audience out there you can turn to for help with traffic and links, and this is social media. Even though it may be harder in some ways to convert this traffic, the mere fact that's coming is a sign that your pages are still relevant, and this matters to Google.
3. Look at your Google Webmaster Tools – This is a invaluable resource that can help you spot penalties and SEO issues very quickly. If you are not signed up for this, sign up now. It's free and is full of useful help.
4. Look into your SEO – when there are ranking problems, it's always a good idea to look in the mirror first. See what if any SEO issues you can find in your pages, such as missing title tags, descriptions, alt tags, flash and some of the other 200 or so ranking factors. Like it or not, these issues are part of how Google ranks you pages.
5. Produce more content and links – Make it your mission to carry on and create good content and incoming backlinks. It might be a good idea to expand your topic and keyword profile here, while still remaining relevant, to see if these pages begin to rank well.