Drop In Rankings, Is speed the reason or something else?

[nicuzara]

I have been working with a seo company do improve my rankigs. Everything went well for about 8 months, all the keywords went up slowly but surely.



I just received the report for September, and 90% of the keywords dropped in ranking. Some dropped a few places (from spot 85 to 89) some quite a few (from 19 to 116).



The SEO company told me it's because of the speed of the website (it doesn't load fast) and I should fix this issue.



We implemented Wordpress 3 months ago, and yes, the webiste is a bit slow, but how come we've seen an actual increase in rankings

after we implemented Wordpress for 2 months., and now in the 3rd month we're seing a drop in rankings?



Before I move my website to a faster server, I just want to make sure that the SEO company is right and it's the speed that't the issue, and not something else.



What do you guys think?

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

#1 Google personalizes rankings so it is very hard to accurately measure your rankings. Tracking how much traffic you gain from Google is smarter. It avoids the inaccuracies caused by personalization and also avoids being tricked by a SEO company that gets you #1 ranking for a keyword with no traffic. Go check how much traffic Google is sending you. Pay attention to what specific landing pages on your site are getting the traffic, this will help you to identify under performing keywords.

#2 Speed is rarely the core reason for a drop in rankings. Of course you want a fast site because users like fast websites (especially mobile users) but Google rarely kills your rankings just because your site is a little slower than the other sites. Wordpress has many setting & plugins that can help you to improve the site performance.

#3 Content & Backlinks - These are two of the bigger influences on rankings. You haven't mentioned anything about them. What have you done to develop great content & backlinks? Duplicate content and spammy backlinks can kill a website's ranking & traffic very fast.