Falling rankings - can't figure out why

[SushiUK]

I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further.

• Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings
• Search visibility is also dropping week on week
• On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter

We have made huge improvements on the following;

• Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%.
• Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support.
• Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures.
• Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium)
• Amended on page structures to include correct H tags.
• Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements

These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings.

One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else?

Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper.

Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious?

The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk

Thanks in advance

Bob

[RobCairns]

Hi Bob,

A couple of immediate questions that spring up:

1. When you instituted page URL changes, did you eliminate old pages entirely or simply alter URL permalinks?
2. At what point did you notice the drops you mentioned (before, during or after the web dev work was done)?
3. Obvious question - have you ensured that each of the new pages is being crawled?
4. What products are being sold on the site? Are there sales guides (review videos, content, blogs) that might help with purchasing decisions?

A few things got my attention immediately:

a) Removing category/product tags in the URL

Not necessarily a good thing. Depending on what you sell, a lot of people use "layman's terms" to find something online via search. Having a product category for relevancy to search queries can improve your organic rankings (especially if people don't know to search for your specific products). I noticed that your pages are directly attuned to exact-match products and keywords but there are shortcomings such as:

• Lack of unique content
• Not enough content on product pages
• Keyword stuffing

The unique content isn't a huge issue since a lot of e-commerce sites have the same problem. However, if you only have keyword-stuffed, short content on each of your product pages then Google won't look favourably upon you. For example, on the "Cheapest Glasses" page, I counted 10 references to "cheap, affordable, discount, knockdown" etc. in 5 sentences. Using semantic keywords is fine, you probably want to spread it out a bit and increase the word count on the page.

b) Backlinks

Having a weak link profile probably isn't the culprit here. Depending on the scope of the service area you have, backlinks may not even be a huge factor in your digital marketing campaign. Basically, if having few backlinks wasn't hurting you 3 months ago, chances are it isn't the cause for the problem now. That being said, having relevant, powerful links to your site isn't going to hurt.

c) Rank tracking

Sometimes adjusting on-site aspects of your website means targeting specific keywords that aren't necessarily what you are tracking. This can make it look like your traffic is dropping while in reality you are just much more optimized for keywords other than what you are tracking. In addition, traffic drops aren't necessarily a bad thing if the targeted traffic you are bringing in is more likely to buy than a larger amount of generic traffic. I would consider what you are attempting to rank for and whether those keywords are what you are tracking.

d) Sales drops

This can be the result of your work on the site, or it might be a natural lull in sales in the industry over the last quarter. I'm sure you've considered this and if these numbers are significantly lower than they were in a year-over-year comparison, then this is something to be worried about. Keep in mind it is coming up to Christmas and a lot of people are looking at stretching their pocket books in the near future - reading glasses are something that people do individually so it is natural to see sales decline in the months leading up to Christmas. I have a client in the optician industry and they see this trend every year, without fail.

e) Title Tags

Last but not least, I noticed a lot of your Title Tags feature pricing for the products listed on the page. It is rare that anyone would search based on pricing so I would be looking to minimize the wording in these tags to maximize your relevancy for organic search. Example:

Currently: Cheapest glasses to fit your prescription from just ......
Could be optimized to: Cheap glasses in the ____ area

The biggest problem I am seeing site-wide is the keyword stuffing. I wouldn't be surprised if you are suffering a Panda penalty rather than a Penguin penalty for your link profile. I would be looking at the content on your site first then the link profile as a distant second. This makes more sense when you consider the only alterations to the site in the recent past were its architecture and content.

I hope this helps by providing some insight - surely there are other potential issues and hopefully others can point them out to help you get over this hurdle.

Feel free to reach out if you would like clarification or extra help. Best of luck moving forward!

Cheers,

Rob

[SushiUK]

Rob,

Thanks so much for your really helpful insights. This highlights areas I need to hone my skills on.

To respond to some of your queries, I should clarify the category tag issue. WooCommerce by default inserts the slug "product" or "product-category" into the URL. and by that I mean those actual words.....so we would have had the URL as follows:

https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/sunglasses/mens-prescription-sunglasses

So we had a completely useless element in the URL that meant nothing. So we emplyed the following plugin to remove the problem:

https://www.perfectseourl.com/

Hence our URL's now have no irrelavent elements in the structure. We took care to redirect any deleted categories.

Re. unique content, this is something we are addressing, we have started to create relevant blogs which offer help and advice to potential customers. New unique content is something we know we need to improve on so this is the focus over the next few months.

I take your point on the product descriptions, however there's only so much detail you can provide on a pair of glasses, and it's easy for it to become very repetitive as the differences between frames are not massive and don't give much material to work with creatively. We're currently working on the product page construction and making amendments which include adding more tabs with more information on each individual frame.

I take your point on the keyword stuffing issue, this is something I need to research more. Sadly Yoast does not seem to downscore my content for keyword stuffing, maybe something they need to address as it's clearly an issue.

Rank tracking, I take your point on this, we inherited the seo from someone who left us no notes on what they were focusing on so it's very much been a case of trial and error. We did find a lot of keywords being optimised were for very low traffic.

Regarding the submission of new links, we have the site linked to webmaster tools and sitemaps generated by Yoast have been submitted... should we be manually submitting these links too?

The industry does lull around this time of year, mainly due to the drop in sunglasses sales as the holiday period ends, but never to this extent. The drop off in sales was almost an overnight phenomenon which did make me wonder if it was down to some penalty or other.

Thanks again for your help!
Bob

[RobCairns]

Hi Bob,

Great points across the board - you are definitely on the right track.

• Category tag issue makes much more sense when you explain it that way

• You are moving in the right direction with unique content. A strategy I have used in the past with e-commerce clients is to choose products 10-20 at a time based on how well they sell (top-sellers first, moving down the list) and creating unique content, reviews, analysis etc. to help visitors make a purchasing decision. This lets you solve the content issue steadily and with maximum ROI without it taking up all of your available time. I would strongly consider creating video reviews of general characteristics of frames (my client features glasses of different materials which allow for different artistic displays, for example) and linking the video in iFrames on each product page to give visitors something to interact with on the page.

• Regarding keyword stuffing, a general rule I operate by is that only 1-2 sentences in 10 should feature anything that could be related to the keyword you are targeting. Use semantic keywords (cheap, affordable, cost-effective, low-cost, inexpensive, etc.) instead of the same expression (cheap glasses, cheap sunglasses, cheap frames, etc.). This isn't an exact science, but basically make sure your pages features 300+ words, and only 2-3 sentences are keyword targeting. Also make sure the H1's and Title Tags are in line with the keywords you are targeting in the content.

• I can take a look at your rank tracking if you would like to see if there's a better strategy you could be using. I know trial and error can produce good results but it can also be extremely frustrating (trust me, I've been there).

• As long as your website is being indexed, there is no need to manually submit links. Google will catch up with what you are doing, typically within 2 weeks. This isn't something I would worry about.

• If it's a cliff-drop scenario in terms of sales, and traffic is decreasing by the same order of magnitude, I would be inclined to say there is some form of penalty involved. Sometimes what you see in situations like this is your rankings take a temporary hit as Google struggles to re-index your new pages. You typically see a 2-4 week drop-off in rankings followed by a resurgence 2-4 weeks later as your new pages rank.

Basically, Google may be struggling to attribute the same level of trust to your new pages as opposed to your old pages (which were trusted due to the time they spent on SERPs).

I would take note of when you first saw the drop-offs. It's hard but try to remember that Google operates with a 2-4 week lag behind work you are conducting. Sometimes you have fixed the problem but it hasn't come about in Google's index yet.

Cheers!

Rob

[SushiUK]

Thanks Rob, That really does help tremendously. Your point about Google being 2-4 weeks behind the curve makes a lot of sense, so I hope that the work we're doing at the moment will start to bear fruit. That said, I can still see a lot of merit in the points you have raised.

Yes, anything you can suggest to give me more to work with would be really helpful. Perhaps we can have a conversation away from here?

My skype is: sushihosting

Perhaps we can have a text chat there?

Many thanks again,

Bob