If you are the owner of a website, it is important that you keep an eye on what is happening with the site. You should try and track your rankings for your most important keywords and you can either do this manually or you can use one of the many different types of software that can do this on an automated basis for you.

You may find that your rankings move up and down a bit weekly anyway but if you start to notice that some or all of your rankings are starting to drop week on week then you may need to start doing some investigation work. If you have a web marketing agency that you work with on a regular basis, then they will be able to look into this and advise you on what they believe has happened. If not, then you may wish to approach one who can tell you what you need to do to get it going in the right direction again.

Sometimes it can be caused by an update to the algorithm that Google or the other search engines use or it could be that one or two of your competitors have managed to push ahead of you due to your website not being updated regularly.

Often sites can recover from a drop in rankings but you should try and pick it up sooner rather than later.