Rankings tanking fast and I cant figure out why. Any insight?

[DemiGR]

http://bit.ly/YGOCNr

This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive.  We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing.  We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank.  We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.

Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO.  The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us.  Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found.  There was about ten of them from places such as:

sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.info

We don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools.  Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc.  I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.

[Linda-Vassily]

Could it have something to do with your topic, rather than the site itself? When I look at "student debt relief" in Google trends, I see a big spike in July, and September is half that. I know on my site that traffic is related to seasonality.

[Ray-pp]

Given your scenario, there could me many areas to check and see what is has changed to effect your rankings. Have you done a 'what's changed' analysis to see exactly where your traffic dropped?

Month-to-month look at the keywords that were sending you traffic and identify which keywords have reduced their visits. Then track those keywords in Moz, see where you can improve on-page, and see what your competitors have done to outrank you.

Once you know why the change has happened, you can adjust to get that traffic back that you've lost.

[DemiGR]

Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods?  I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them.  We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.

Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.

[DemiGR]

I thought this might be the case, and it could be.  When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.

I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.

[Ray-pp]

Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide a 'What's Changed' report, but you can somewhat easily make that report by exporting your Keyword information and traffic details to excel, then comparing your top terms over time.

I wouldn't suggest looking at all 1600 keywords. Instead, identify the keywords that sent 80% of your traffic and see what's changed among those. Was there a few specific keywords that sent huge amounts of traffic and no longer do so? Or can you identify a general decrease across all keywords (maybe signalling a seasonal change?).

[IPIM]

I would look at before and after dates in analytics and compare to see where your traffic loss is occurring.

Have you been manually tracking the rank of your keywords over time?  have you noticed a drop off for a keyword that you would expect to be a high traffic driver?

It could be that you have lost a referring link that was sending over a lot of traffic, was/are you doing any PPC traffic that may have had an affect on your volumes, sometimes people forget that PPC spend also drives organic traffic, so you would see a natural decline in organic traffic if you slow down your PPC spend.