Big drop in rankings

Site URL: https://www.partisanadvertising.co.nz/

Hello

I've been using SQSP for years now and have recently had a terrible drop in my google rankings. Two years ago I ranked at an average of #2 for my keywords. And now, from an average ranking of 6, I have dropped to 21 in less than a month. I've checked everything I can, using web dev from Google, Neil Patel's app, seranking.com and I can't see anything that would cause such a drop. I am using the Brine template family. What am I missing? Has anyone had this happen to them before? Any help would be so much appreciated as I am at the end of my tether.

Thanks in advance.

Greg

Hi Greg,

There's a bunch of reasons that could be driving this change, so you'd need to do more analysis to really get to the answer.

There's a couple of things I'd point to here:

• You're looking at "average position", but it's not clear from the screenshots what the total group of keywords is that the average is drawn from. If it's a specific, limited set of keywords you've chosen to target and the average has gone down that is indeed bad news. But if it's an average position metric based on the total number of keywords the site is ranking for, this might actually be good news – the site is starting to rank for many more keywords, but in lower positions in the SERPs, so that's dragging your overall average down. This is why you have to be really careful about using "average position" as a KPI, and many of the SEO tools don't make that very clear.
• If you're specifically concerned about the drop in the past week, Google is currently rolling out a core update and when that happens it's not unusual to see some instability in the search rankings. If you haven't changed anything on your site recently that could have caused a new, technical issue I'd recommend giving it a few weeks until the rankings stabilize after the core update is complete and see if those positions come back.

Hope that helps. If you need more help digging into the data to diagnose let me know.

Ed

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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.

Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

Thanks Ed

I have just seen that I have a DNS error appearing but the DNS settings appear to be OK, saying the record is found. Could this have a bearing on the drop in rankings? I haven't changed anything in these settings so I'm a bit baffled.

You might want to check with Squarespace support about that. Typically you'll need to add four A records and 2 CNAME records when connecting a domain. It might just be that it was connected a long time ago and SS wants to nudge you to update those settings.

Your site is still loading fine though, so it shouldn't be impacting search rankings.

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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.

Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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