What to do When a Google Update Causes Your Rankings to Drop

If your website and business rely on organic traffic to generate revenue, then you’re at the mercy of Google. 

This is great when Google is on your side. You’re riding high and getting tons of traffic without having to pay for ads. But a single algorithm update could derail things quickly.

Don’t panic.

In my 30 years of doing SEO, I’ve seen my fair share of these instances first-hand—for my clients and for my own sites. And unless you’re a spammer or applying blat-hat SEO tactics, there’s a good chance you can recover. 

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1 — Understand What Really Happened Before You Make Any Drastic Decisions

The first thing you need to do is figure out exactly what happened. This is the only logical way you can move forward with a clear sense of direction. 

Verify That a Google Update is Actually the Culprit

Don’t automatically assume that a drop in traffic is due to a ranking change or algorithm update. While Google may have something to do with this, double-check that something else didn’t go wrong.

• Server outages or downtime
• Lost backlinks
• A major update to your website
• Manual penalties
• Accidentally telling Google to deindex pages

These are just examples that could cause you to lose traffic. 

So take the time to rule out all scenarios. Some of this stuff can be checked in a matter of seconds, like using Search Console to see if Google gave you a manual penalty.

With the exception of core updates, Google doesn’t always announce changes—and they’re constantly making small tweaks to the algorithm. So unless your traffic dropped within days or weeks of a major update, the problem may have nothing to do with Google.

Make Sure Your Expectations Are Realistic

Assuming that the rankings drop is related to a Google algorithm change, you need to take a deep breath and understand that your traffic isn’t going to recover overnight. 

It can take a week or so for core updates to work out any bugs. But beyond that, you need to accept that your drop in the SERPs is your new normal—at least in the short term. 

Too many people overreact here. While it’s reasonable to be frustrated, it’s not time to close your doors or anything just yet. Just like it took time to climb the rankings before, you’ll need to put in some hard work to climb your way back.

Adjust Your Plan to Account For Less Traffic

If a loss of traffic is directly impacting your revenue streams and bottom line, you should address this ASAP. You may need to scale back or reallocate certain funds and potentially adjust your budget.

This can sometimes get tricky, as you need to figure out what’s best for short-term gains as well as the long-term growth of your business.

For example, you may need to start running PPC ads to generate leads and revenue. But if you completely cut the cord on your content budget, you’ll never recover your organic traffic. 

My best advice here is to think big-picture. If anything, now is the best time to double down on your SEO budget. 

Step 2 — Narrow Your Focus

Once you’ve ruled out everything other than a Google update, you need to dig a bit deeper and figure out what specifically caused your rankings to drop.

Clean Up Technical Issues

Start with technical stuff. You may need a developer to help you out with this, but you’ll need to assess things like your page loading time, canonical URL changes, robots.txt files, HTTP status codes, redirects, and more.

I don’t want to go too deep with these explanations right now because it won’t serve you well if you don’t understand them. 

But you essentially need to confirm that Google is still crawling your site properly and indexing everything correctly. If not, a technical SEO cleanup could resolve this problem and bump you back up in the SERPs.

Figure Out if it’s a Sitewide Issue or Just Select Keywords and URLs

Next, determine if all of your pages have dropped in the rankings or if it’s just a few search terms. You can easily do this in Google Search Console by comparing two periods (before and after the update).

Then navigate to the “Pages” tab and sort the data “Clicks Differences” to see if one or two URLs have lost more traffic than the rest.

This step is really important because it can potentially save you a ton of time doing extra steps that won’t actually make a difference. Here’s an example so you can understand what I mean. 

For a short period, I had a client that was actually ranking first for the search term Venmo fees—even ranking ahead of Venmo. They lost traffic after a Google update but it was determined that the bulk of losses came from this one page dropping in the SERPs.

Nothing was actually wrong with the site or content. Google just recognized a clear flaw in what was being displayed for those results. 

Step 3 — Audit Your Content and Analyze Your Competitors

I think it’s important to run your content audit at the same time as a competitor analysis because the results need to be used jointly for your next steps. Looking at each of these in isolation doesn’t quite tell the full story, especially when it comes to a drop in the SERPs. 

For example, let’s say you’re losing your top five best keywords. Who is now ranking ahead of you?

You’ll need to compare your content side-by-side with competitors who jumped ahead of you in the search results. What are they doing that you’re not doing? 

Tips For Your Content Audit

I ran a content audit earlier this year so it’s fresh on my mind. It wasn’t due to a Google update or drop in the SERPs, but it was long overdue and I just wanted to identify areas for improvement. 

Here are my suggestions to make sure you run a content audit the right way.

• Don’t rush. It took my team about a full month to truly audit everything (without making any actual changes).
• Focus on quality and relevance.
• Identify your top-performing pages that are still ranking, and see if you can squeeze even more juice out of them.
• Then prioritize pages that lost the most amount of traffic after the update.
• See if any pages are cannibalizing each other in the search results, and look for strategic opportunities to consolidate that into a single page.
• Make sure you apply proper 301s and 404s if you’re planning to remove and redirect pages.

Trust me, this works.

My organic clicks are up 122.75% when comparing this past month’s traffic to the same period last year, and I can guarantee it’s directly related to what I found in my content audit. 

Tips For Your Competitor Analysis

If you’re not already using an SEO tool, you’re going to have to bite the bullet here and buy one. To keep it simple, just go with Ahrefs.

I have no affiliation with them, but it’s the tool I use and I’ve experimented with everything over the years. 

With the rank tracker feature, you can simply import a list of your keywords, pick your competitors, and Ahrefs will automatically track that information over time. There’s also a competitive overview chart that shows exactly how your positions are changing in the SERPs compared to your top competitors. 

This process can feel overwhelming at times because you’re analyzing information from multiple websites at once.

To simplify things, focus just on your top five competitors. Then narrow the analysis down specifically to their top five pages each. From there, identify five additional pages for each competitor where you’ve lost ranking positions and they’ve gained. 

The end result is 50 total URLs to analyze, which is much more reasonable than comparing hundreds or thousands of pages. 

Pro Tip: In addition to looking at pages where you’ve lost traffic, try to identify any keyword gaps between your site and your competitors. Even though you technically haven’t lost rankings for keywords you weren’t previously targeting, this is a great opportunity to get new traffic.

Step 4 — Map Out Your Revised Strategy

By now, you’re armed with all of the information you need to map out your plan of attack moving forward. Commit to a minimum of 12 months, and then you can re-evaluate things from there. 

Here’s what else you should consider when you’re strategizing:

• Focus on high-priority technical SEO issues first.
• Continue producing high-quality content over the long run.
• Include a blend of new content and updates to existing content.
• Don’t forget about link-building (which you can do from outreach, guest posting, etc.).
• Produce new types of content for different channels, like podcasts, YouTube videos for SEO, and organic social content. 

Your plan should be ultra-specific, and while you don’t necessarily need to have every single keyword or podcast topic idea planned for 12 months, you should know what you’re going to produce and how you’re going to do it.

I recommend a minimum of six new blog posts per month for the next year. The more you can do the better the outcome will be. But six is the absolute minimum, as one or two just won’t move the needle.

Step 5 — Wait it Out

This is the hardest part. But when it comes to SEO, time is on your side. 

A new blog post written today won’t recover all of your lost traffic tomorrow. That’s just not how it works. 

Here’s an example that illustrates the importance of patience:

This blog post was published in January, and it received virtually zero clicks for the first five months on the web. 

Then it slowly started to gain some traction after six months before exploding and ultimately getting over 26,000 clicks in the year.

So if you evaluate your content strategy after just three months, you might look at a post like this, say it’s not performing, and then maybe abandon your strategy. This would be a fatal mistake.

Remember, I said you should commit to a minimum of six blogs per month for the next year. That’s 72 blogs total. If just four of those posts performed like this one, that’s an extra 100,000+ clicks. 

Would you be happy with that? I’d like to think so.

The other reason why it’s important to wait things out is because there’s a high likelihood that another Google update will be right around the corner. As the algorithm continues to evolve, a future update might actually help you.

For example, I recently wrote a post answering the question—is Google’s algorithm broken?

In that post I specifically mentioned how previous Google updates have resulted in sites like Forbes unfairly getting a lift in SERPs for content that they shouldn’t be ranking for. 

Well, Google has since adjusted. 

Forbes lost roughly 48% of its traffic from July 2024 (68.7 million) to December 2024 (38.5 million). And it’s still on a downward trajectory. 

Why is this important? Well, now other sites that previously had lost ranking positions to Forbes have been able to claw back.

Here’s an example of one of my clients competing directly with Forbes in the SERPs (name redacted for privacy). 

This site used to get over 50,000 organic clicks per month. But last year’s update crushed them, and they were getting as few as 5,000 organic clicks in July of 2024.

Well, as traffic from Forbes dropped 48% in the past six months, organic clicks to this website have skyrocketed 715% over the same period.

Google’s newest changes have rewarded them, and they’ve been able to reclaim traffic that was previously lost.

Final Thoughts

Losing traffic and watching your rankings drop as a result of a Google update can be a tough pill to swallow. But it’s not the end of the world. 

Just take the time to truly understand what caused the drop and create a plan of action moving forward. 

Most of all, remember to be patient. This isn’t something that will correct itself overnight. 

But unless you’re a spammer or black-hat SEO, you definitely have a chance to recover your traffic and reclaim your ranking positions in the SERPs.

If you’re overwhelmed by this and need some help, contact my team here at McDougall Interactive for assistance.