May 16th, 2010 by Nick

A large proportion of the hard work put in by any search engine optimisation company is done to achieve a high search ranking within search engine results pages (SERPs). The benefits of having a high ranking within SERPs are great – it gives you an edge over your competitors, increases traffic to your website and increases its stature as a whole. With search engine rankings being crucial in the world of SEO, it is one thing achieving a high ranking and another thing completely to keep it high.

It is a common occurrence for companies to achieve their desired high rank and then see it slowly diminish. This happens quite often if a business only uses a search engine optimization company for the initial ranking as the process is not maintained, but it can also happen even if SEO methods are still being used to retain a high search engine position. Whether you are a search engine optimisation company or a business hiring these services, it is a good idea to make yourself aware of the factors and reasons why your search ranking position seems to be slipping away from you.

Competitor activity is a very high cause of a dwindling search ranking position. No matter what SEO strategies your business uses for their website, if a competitor’s website does it better then it is going to rank higher than you. If you are hiring an external service or company to maintain your search ranking position then they should monitor this for you, but if you are dealing with it yourself then this is a very likely reason. There is no stopping your competitor activity, but you can monitor their movements closely and respond as quickly as possible to any changes. Real time search is a great way of doing this, enabling you to rectify the situation extremely quickly.

It is worth checking on the SEO methods which have been used. If you are not solely in charge of your search marketing then it is worth just double checking that only ethical SEO techniques have been used. Any unethical or black hat strategies could have been picked up by the search engines and in more severe cases, even banned from certain SERP’s. Even if your site is not banned, search engines such Google may penalise websites which in turn devaluates them and results in a lower ranking position. Sometimes being penalised can be more damaging to a site than being banned, as a banned site is not much use so often needs to be started from scratch, whilst a penalised site has to try and claw its way back up the search rankings.

With the likes of Google being more and more strict on its security measures, there is a chance that a link or tag from your website may be recognised as untrustworthy or unknown. New domains in particular can be affected by Google sandbox, so if your site is fairly new then this could be a likely cause.

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