My rankings have dropped, should I panic?

As a conscientious business person, you probably take a keen interest in your website. The performance of your website, the sales it generates, the leads it creates, the costs it incurs and of course the rankings within Google that it enjoys are all important things to keep a close eye on.

But what happens if, no when, your rankings take a dip? Is it time to hit the panic button, start firing employees and switching SEO agencies?

In a word, no.

The reason you should stay calm, take a deep breath and take it in your stride is that Google updates its algorithm constantly. It updates its index constantly. It’s not a fixed list that hardly every changes, it’s forever in flux – meaning that your website can move up and down the SERPs (search engine results pages) for specific searches several times per day.

You could check your rankings in the morning, find that they have dipped, only to realise that by the afternoon they have returned, perhaps even improved. Movement is unavoidable, and as it happens, necessary, for your search engine rankings to improve. If you check your rankings every day you’re likely to see constant changes, and each change should not be cause to hold a board meeting and brainstorm ideas on how you can improve your SEO efforts.

Keeping a close eye on your rankings is important, as you don’t want to take your eye off the ball – but to coin another well used and very clichéd phrase, a watched pot never boils.

It’s a good idea to run regular ranking reports for your keywords, and rather than focus on the occasional and unavoidable dips in those reports, focus on the gradient of the improvement – that’s what’s important.