My Website Just Dropped in Ranking – I Haven’t Changed Anything – Has it been Hacked?


If I change nothing on my website, my rank position will also not change?

This is a common question especially from new or potential clients. Everything has been going along nicely, then wham! Your website drops in rankings.

“There must be a reason, has someone hacked my website?” This is akin to thinking, “if I change nothing on my website, my rank position will also not change”.

Ranking in Google is Akin to Running in a Race

What this analogy means is that often ranking can fluctuate even though nothing was changed on your website. Rather, it is the environment or the competition that has changed.

Keep Up or Get Left Behind

Typically, we spend a considerable amount of time each month monitoring site performance and keeping clients’ sites competitive. Below are a few examples of the kinds of things we are seeing associated with what your competition may do or be doing to beat you, or ways the ranking goalposts may be changing on you. These are all things that have recently changed significantly and are likely to dramatically impact your website’s ranking.

Google is Ratcheting up Mobile UX as a Ranking Factor

This means optimizing the experience a visitor has when visiting your website on a smartphone and being able to complete specific tasks. To combat this, we are instigating a major effort to improve the mobile user’s experience across all sites – this is a 1 – 3 month effort depending upon site size and budget.

Google is Shifting to Mobile-First Indexing

This means mobile site code efficiency becomes critical – this requires deep level code analysis – this is roughly a 1 -2 week dedicated developer activity.

Mobile CTR & Bounce Rates

Google mobile-first indexing also means that mobile search CTR and site stickiness on a mobile device is now a primary ranking factor on both mobile and desktops.  We now carefully work through mobile search results presentation (competitive analysis of title & description tag and optimization) to increase CTRs and lower mobile bounce rates. This is a page-by-page competitive analysis and tweaking process that can take months on a typical website.

Link Building is Back

This means having a link outreach program has become vital to ranking.  We are developing this activity with each client depending upon their engagement level and budget.

Negative SEO is Back with a Vengeance

Positive SEO is a thing we do to improve and market a client’s site. Negative SEO is a thing that your competitors do to damage your ability to rank. Under negative SEO there are a ton of tactics that range from hacking sites, installing malicious code on it, to sending links that are spammy in nature and likely to cause Google to lower your website’s ranking. We have seen several sites recently impacted by this activity.

Engineering Level SEO

This is an increasingly important “evergreen” work-in-progress on any and all websites. It covers a whole range of activities such as page load speed optimization, code optimization, link error analysis, title tag duplication, HTML to content ratios, duplicate content issues, SSL issues, GSC flags, and site map optimization.  We have yet to see any website that could not be significantly improved by engineering-level SEO improvements. Why is this an evergreen activity? Think of it this way, websites are not “built and they are done” assets. Just like a car that does hundreds of miles over rough terrain: servicing, tuning, and enhancing the performance of that car must be regularly done to stay competitive.

Adding SSL Certificates

Google has recently further raised the importance of adding a quality SSL certificate to a website as a ranking factor. It used to be that only eCommerce stores needed SSL (HTTP to HTTPS) now every website needs one. We have proactively initiated a program to upgrade all our clients’ sites to SSL.

Structured Data

Right now on most sites, this is poorly done and or barely implemented. We recently looked at the website of a very large 150-million-dollar company and found that they had zero structured data. While not a critical component of SEO right now – it’s coming, best to prepare and implement now.

Core SEO Still Matters

The above list is not meant to minimize the importance of such things as content velocity, relevance and quality, citation flow, social media marketing, online review velocity and engagement, and video marketing. It just represents some of the things that have become significantly more important to a successful website over the last 2-3 months.

There are more, for example, we are seeing that well-thought-out live chat engagements make a difference to SEO. What does “well thought out engagement” mean?  What it does not mean is to just install live chat on your website and then respond when a visitor initiates a conversation, but then more on that later…