After recrawl Google drops me lower

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[RobCairns]

Hi Mark,

From what I am seeing, there isn't much you are doing "wrong" here.

1. On-Page

There are very few errors from the crawl I ran. Your site may be technically sound but perhaps you could work on the content to create some greater contextual keyword (LSI Keyword) data for Google to crawl. Your Page Load Speed is decent, so I don't see that being the problem. Your site is also mobile-friendly, so that's not the reason your rankings are dropping.

2. Link Profile

You have a large percentage of your links pointing to your long tail landing pages and only a few pointing to your Home page. That coupled with the fact that most links pointing to your Home page are NoFollow's suggests to me that you probably aren't getting a lot of link juice to your site from them. You also have a lot of repetitive links coming from the same domains (though your referring IPs:referring domains ratio is solid). That being said, many links pointing to your long tail pages are DoFollow's giving them better rank-ability.

3. Competition Analysis

I think this is the big player to take into account in your case. By and large, I think this is a case of your competitors simply out-working you. From a technical perspective, you aren't really doing anything wrong - you may just need to ramp up content production, keyword targeting, contextual linking and relevancy.

It doesn't seem like there's a penalty here - I think it just requires a new content marketing strategy and perhaps some keyword re-targeting. You could start with gaining an SSL certificate for the site as Google reps have said this provides a slight boost to rankings.

One problem I am seeing is that you are targeting multiple keywords with your Title Tags and H1's. You might want to pick one and use the other as an LSI keyword in your content.

(i.e. the page you provided is targeting "back pain acupuncture NYC" and "low back pain acupuncture") - there might be a Panda penalty involved here depending on how steep the drops in your rankings are and for how long they have continued.

My last word would be that you may also be a bit too focused on rankings rather than driving traffic to your site - it might be worth considering some KW re-targeting to determine what keywords are actually going to bring you traffic that converts into profit for your business. Some keywords you are targeting are unlikely to be searched even as long tails so the pages may not be very useful to you except to act as information to people browsing your site.

Feel free to get in touch and I will try to provide further insight if you want.

Cheers and good luck!

Rob

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[RobCairns]

Hi Mark,

Which keywords are you dropping in rankings for? The addition of citations to your profile would not cause a drop unless they were duplicates, or you have different NAP information from an office move or similar situation.

I'm assuming the citations were created with the same information as your Google My Business page?

Beyond that, it's tough to say exactly what might be causing a rankings drop without looking at main competitors to determine if they have generated some ranking boosts simultaneously with your drops.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Mark,

Thanks so much for giving the community an opportunity to look at your website. I agree with Robert that we may need some more details from you about what terms you are dropping for and whether you are talking about local pack rankings or organic rankings, but in the meantime, here's what I see at a glance:

1. You've been doing this on your own. Congratulations for being an entrepreneur and it's easy to see that you've put a great deal of work into your website. That being said, you are in a very competitive geography and industry, and your website does look a bit dated. This matters, because how users interact with your website (bounce, click-thru, time on site, etc.) could be influencing Google's perception of how popular and relevant a resource your website is, compared to competitors. A professional redesign of the website would be high on a list of priorities. The redesign must include better navigation, a layout that works on all browsers, better architecture, better branding, etc.

2. Related to the above, the website's design is not mobile-friendly or responsive. Look at the site on a cell phone and you will see the rendering issues going on. A redesign of the site absolutely must be responsive/mobile-friendly.

3. Google grades the quality of the text on websites. Right now, the actual text content on the website is not grammatically correct. A professional re-write of the content should also be a high priority.

4. Those are just 3 things I'm seeing within about a minute of look at the website. They are major issues, all of which could be adversely impacting your rankings over time as competitors invest more and move up and your website falls back as a result.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and that you'll receive more input from the community.

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Mark,

I do understand that you've put a lot of work in on your website. I also understand that you may be getting cold calls from companies offering to redesign your website or do SEO for you, and that you don't know if you can trust that. Fortunately, asking here in the forum is a good way to get impartial advice from a community that wants to help you without deriving any benefit from it for themselves.

Your website is not rendering properly on either my laptop or my Android phone. On the homepage, for example, those sections of side-by-side text are all being crunched on top of one another. This is why I'm suggesting that you need to consider a professional redesign of the website, for usability errors like this which could be leading to people abandoning your website on various devices. Additionally, the formatting of the masthead area of your website is pretty unusual. Most people expect to see a logo either left-top or center-top ... not lower down on the page. Again, I understand that you've worked hard on this, but a more standardized formatting of your website design with cross-browser and cross-device compliance could improve how users are interacting with the site, linking to the site, etc.,... all of which may influence the popularity and thus the rankings of the website.

Regarding the text copy on your website, some examples of grammar issues would include these, from the homepage:

At our office you will be treated in a comfortable private room, with a customized acupuncture protocol the way we successfully improve health of our patients with a good track record since 1993.

Tree of Life Acupuncture NYC clinic strives to offer great healing experience and best acupuncture methods.

We do our best to offer outstanding healing experience.

Awkward sentence structure may cause a number or issues that could ultimately be impacting your rankings.

I know it takes guts to open up your website for others to critique, but I hope the feedback you are receiving from our community will ultimately help you critique your own work, see where you can improve and strengthen your overall marketing!

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[MiriamEllis]

Hey Mark,

No worries, and I have nothing but admiration for people who tackle English as a second language. I've studied a number of languages and have taught several of them, and can vouch for the fact that there is NO harder language in which to gain fluency than English. As you say, it's your second language, and there can be nuances to this that will then come across as not sounding quite fluent to native speakers. So, from those 3 examples I pulled, let me take a minute to show you what I mean:

At our office you will be treated in a comfortable private room, with a customized acupuncture protocol the way we successfully improve health of our patients with a good track record since 1993.

The structure of the above is confusing, with the sense of the sentence getting lost. This might be a bit better:

We have improved the health of X number of patients since opening the doors of our acupuncture clinic in 1993. Expect a comfortable, private room where you'll be relaxing and receiving your fully-customized  treatment at Tree of Life Acupuncture NYC.

Tree of Life Acupuncture NYC clinic strives to offer great healing experience and best acupuncture methods.

I'd suggest:

At Tree of Life Acupuncture NYC, you can expect a great healing experience utilizing the most effective acupuncture methods.

We do our best to offer outstanding healing experience.

I'd suggest:

We are committed to offering you an outstanding healing experience.

So, basically, just small edits, making sure articles and pronouns are receiving proper attention. Personally, I'd be extremely stressed if I had to write professional copy in a second language I'd studied and it would take a load off my mind to hire a native speaking editor to be sure the finished product was letter-perfect.

You are so right that trial and error really pays off in SEO. Good luck with all you are undertaking!

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[MiriamEllis]

So glad to hear you're making progress, Mark!