The lower search results usually fluctuate much more than the top search results. If your website is new in the top 5 results, you can expect more fluctuation than websites that have been listed in the top 5 results for a longer time.

You can also expect higher fluctuation if the keywords are related to a hot topic. If Google shows results that are marked with "two hours ago", or "one day ago" then it's likely that the keyword is related to such a hot topic.

If your website was ranked in the same positions for several weeks before the rankings dropped, you should take a closer look at the changes.

You can only react to the changes, if you find out what actually happened. Here are some questions that can help you to identify the problem:

• On which search engine has the ranking change occurred?
• Has the change happened in a particular region?
• Which pages have been affected by the change?
• Has the ranking change had an impact on your conversions and your website traffic?
• Did the same happen a year ago? This might be a seasonal issue.

After identifying the affected pages, you can proceed to the details:

• Which keywords caused the traffic change?
• Which competitors gained rankings for these keywords?

The Ranking Monitor in SEOprofiler has the answers to these questions. The Ranking Monitor shows the ranking changes of your own web pages, and the ranking changes of your competitors.

Here's an example:

You might find out that the ranking changes happened to short category-level keywords (for example, the keyword "shoes"). You also find out that the pages and websites that gained rankings had informational character. The pages and websites that lost rankings were shopping sites.

Things like that happen quite often. Google's algorithms might have re-evaluated the intent behind a query group. In this example, Google decided that people who search for "shoes" are interested in getting information, not in buying.

Do not arbitrarily change your SEO tactics. Find the reason for the problem and then react wisely.

If your competitors now have better rankings than your site, analyze the pages of your competitors to find out why they rank better than your pages. The Top 10 Optimizer tool in SEOprofiler can help you to do that.

If all of your pages dropped, there might be a technical problem on your website that is the reason for the ranking drop. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler identifies things that can have a negative impact on your rankings.

"There are a lot of people asking if the title/header change Google made on August 17th has any impact on rankings. [...] The clearest response from a Googler on this question was from John Mueller of Google who said 'no' this does not impact rankings."

On Twitter, Google's John Mueller said that keyword rich domains do not help for SEO. However, they might be useful for ads and other things: "IMO not for SEO reasons, but you might find them useful for things like ads."

"Lighthouse scores do not affect Google Search. Doing this kind of user-agent cloaking is a terrible idea - you're just deceiving yourself. It makes absolutely no sense, and prevents you from finding real issues. If you run across a plugin that does this, report it to the CMS."

"Google told us the other day that the title change for the search result snippets no longer uses queries to customize the title of the search result snippets. But the search result descriptions, the snippets, still are customized based on user query."