You receive a report from your SEO agency and see that your site has dropped several positions. First thought? “What am I paying these people for!” Before you send an angry email and start looking for a new agency, it’s worth understanding one fundamental truth—most drops in Google have nothing to do with SEO mistakes.

When Has a Site Dropped in Google Due to SEO Errors?

Yes, sometimes SEO specialists really do make mistakes. Over-optimization, buying cheap links from spammy directories, or hiding text on a page are classic examples of actions that harm more than help. If your SEO specialist uses these types of practices, a drop in visibility is only a matter of time. Google today is advanced enough to detect every attempt to manipulate search results.

Another scenario is when an agency implements technical changes without proper preparation. Example? Migrating a site to a new URL without configuring 301 redirects. For Google, this is a signal that the old site has been removed and the new one is just starting from scratch. All previous SEO achievements are lost. Similarly, disabling key subpages without consultation works the same way—you lose not only those specific URLs but also traffic from phrases that ranked on them.

What Really Causes Drops Independent of the SEO Specialist?

Your site can lose positions for reasons completely independent of the SEO specialist’s actions. Google algorithm updates happen regularly—sometimes several times a month. When Google changes the way it evaluates sites, your website may drop even though yesterday everything worked perfectly. This isn’t an SEO specialist’s error, just a change in the rules by the search engine itself.

Competition never sleeps. If a company in your industry just hired a strong SEO team and invested in comprehensive optimization, they can overtake you. Imagine this situation: you run a sports shoe store, your site is in third position for the phrase “running shoes.” Suddenly a major competitor publishes a series of detailed guides, gains valuable links from running portals, and improves their site structure. You drop to fifth position not because your SEO specialist is working poorly, but because someone else is working better.

Seasonality is another factor that no agency controls. If you sell garden furniture, a natural drop in interest during winter will translate to lower organic traffic, regardless of the SEO specialist’s efforts. Google shows content that matches users’ current needs, and when those needs weaken, so does the visibility of your seasonal products.

Mistakes on Your End Can Ruin SEO Results

Ironically, the most common cause of drops are decisions made by the business owner themselves or their IT team—without consulting the SEO agency. Real-life example: an online store owner had a programmer add an entire product category to the robots.txt file to “not index these things yet because we don’t have photos.” Result? Google stopped seeing dozens of subpages that were generating traffic. A forty percent drop within a week.

Similarly, installing an SSL certificate without proper redirect configuration works the same way. You change addresses from HTTP to HTTPS but forget about technical details. Google treats this like moving the entire website—the old version disappears from the index, the new one must build position from the beginning. Your SEO specialist might not have known about this because no one informed them about the planned change.

Sometimes the cause is also simple security neglect. A hacked site that redirects users to fake services or displays spam will be penalized by Google. You can check this in Google Search Console in the “Security and Manual Actions” section. If you see a warning there, you already know the problem doesn’t lie in SEO strategy but in server protection.

How to Determine the Real Cause of Position Drops?

Before you accuse your SEO specialist of incompetence, conduct a simple verification. Check in Google Search Console whether the number of clicks actually dropped—this will confirm the problem is real and not due to an error in the position monitoring tool. Then review the site’s change history for the last month. Did someone modify content, change page titles, move categories? Each such intervention could have affected visibility.

The next step is technical SEO verification. Type in your browser “yoursite.com/robots.txt” and check whether you’re accidentally blocking Google robots. If you see the line “Disallow: /”, you have a problem—your site is telling the search engine not to even try indexing it. Also check the XML sitemap to see if it contains all important URLs and whether it’s been properly encoded.

Also analyze the competition in tools like Senuto or Semrush. If you see that sites in your industry are simultaneously rising while you’re dropping, the cause likely lies on your end or in competitors’ actions. However, if the entire industry recorded a drop at the same time, it was almost certainly due to a Google algorithm update.

When Is It Worth Changing SEO Agencies, and When Should You Give Them a Chance?

Changing SEO specialists makes sense when you see specific neglect in basic areas. If your agency doesn’t regularly monitor Google Search Console, doesn’t inform you about important algorithm changes, doesn’t react to technical errors for weeks, or uses outdated practices like automatic link directories—these are signals that the cooperation doesn’t make sense.

On the other hand, if you’ve been working together for six months, you see stable organic growth, the agency communicates transparently and explains the causes of temporary drops, and the drop itself is small and short-lived—give them time to react. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes a site needs to “stabilize” after changes, sometimes you need to wait for Google to re-analyze updated content.

Open communication is also key. A good agency will ask you about every planned technical change, request access to information about site modifications, and suggest regular status meetings. If your SEO specialist works in a vacuum, it’s no surprise they can’t prevent problems resulting from decisions made without their knowledge.

Sign Up for a Consultation and Check Your Strategy

If your site has dropped in Google and you don’t know whether it’s the SEO specialist’s fault, a technical error, or an algorithm change—don’t leave it to chance. I invite you to an individual consultation during which we’ll analyze your situation and identify specific causes of the drop. We’ll check both your current agency’s actions and factors independent of SEO that could have affected positions. Book now and regain control over your business’s visibility in Google.