When your rankings fall after hiring an SEO company, the first job is not to assign blame. It is to find out what actually happened. A ranking drop can come from the company’s work, from a Google algorithm update, or from a seasonal shift in how people search for your products. Each cause calls for a different response, so separating them early keeps you from firing a competent partner or excusing a careless one.
Separate a company-caused drop from an update or seasonal change
Start with timing and pattern. If a broad set of pages lost position at once, check whether the drop lines up with a known Google core update. Google announces these updates and publishes the rollout dates, and search industry sites track them closely. A drop that matches an update window across many sites in your industry points to an algorithm change, not your provider.
A company-caused drop usually looks different. It tends to follow a specific action: a site migration, a redirect change, a batch of new content, a technical edit, or a round of link building. The damage is often concentrated on the pages that were touched. If rankings fell within days of a known change to your site and the affected pages map to that change, the company’s work is a likely cause.
Seasonal change is the third possibility. Some businesses see search demand rise and fall through the year. If interest in your category naturally dips in this period, traffic can fall while your actual positions hold steady. Comparing this year to the same months last year, and checking ranking position rather than raw traffic alone, helps you tell a seasonal lull from a real ranking loss.
Ask for a clear explanation
Once you see a drop, ask the company to explain it in plain terms. A capable provider should be able to tell you what changed, when it changed, and why. Vague answers are a warning sign. So is a provider that blames Google for everything without showing the analysis behind that claim. You are entitled to a specific, evidence-based account, not reassurance.
Expect them to diagnose and fix their own mistakes
If the company’s work caused the drop, fixing it is their responsibility, and the correction should not carry an extra charge. Diagnosis should be methodical: review what was changed, identify the most likely cause, fix that first, and watch the results before making more changes. Reacting too fast and changing many things at once creates more instability and makes the real cause harder to find. Technical fixes, such as removing an accidental noindex tag or correcting a broken redirect, can recover rankings within days once the page is recrawled. The company should also request reindexing for the corrected pages so the fix registers sooner.
Review the change logs
Ask for the change history. Google Search Console and most rank tracking tools keep dated records, and the company should maintain its own log of every edit it makes. Line up the dates of those changes against the date your rankings fell. This is the clearest way to confirm or rule out a company-caused drop, and it replaces argument with a documented timeline. A provider that cannot produce a change log has a transparency problem regardless of what caused the drop.
Escalate or leave if they deflect
A trustworthy company will own a mistake, explain it, and fix it without being pushed. If yours dodges the question, refuses to share change logs, blames forces it cannot show evidence for, or wants to bill you to repair its own error, escalate the issue with its management in writing. If the deflection continues, that pattern matters more than the single drop. Review your contract for the notice period, gather your account access and historical data, and prepare to move to a provider that will give you straight answers. How a company handles a setback tells you more about it than any result during a good month.