Never recovered from loss of visibility in Google, what did we miss?

[WebdesignTilburg]

Hello, I hope someone can help me, or can recommend someone who could look into this in more detail a a consultancy service or something.

Our client https://bit.ly/2IjLD7X experienced a bad drop in visibility early 2017 which we didn't manage to recover from. We had a problem with one main category page that wasn't indexed anymore (it was #1 for a major keyword in the Netherlands). We were able to fix the problem eventually (had to do with the .be being indexed instead due to no hreflang) but never really recovered with that page, only the entire site around that time saw a major drop in visibility.

The client went to another agency (a renowned agency in the Netherlands) but after over half a year they haven't been able to recover. Organic visits are still down 45% compared to the same period last year. Another major Dutch keyword they ranked #1 for is now #9 for instance.

So basically two SEO agencies (we and the other one) have tried everything we could think of for the past year, but none of us seem to know what the problem is and the owner is quite desperate (it's a small store with only 3 employees and his monthly revenue is only half of what it once was.

I'm afraid a quick look into the site won't help anyone find the issue, so if someone has a good idea of how we can help this previous client I would love to hear so!

[martinxm]

Hello, KAWP.

An analysis in Moz Pro, according to the dates, has made me doubt in the following image. There are two timestamps in which the competition has managed to grow its external links in a potential way. Could it be that it coincides with the change of positions in google with your client?

In that case one of the solutions would be to increase the external links. So so much.

If the answer were useful do not forget to mark it as a Good Answer. Thanks!

pU2W4wX

[WebdesignTilburg]

Thank you for helping. It started well before that actually, more or less in April / May 2017, but it did get worse in October 2017 (although based on your image one of the competitors improved its backlinks right after that). Well I'm sure it had something to do with it. Unfortunately my client doesn't have the same budgets for referral / authority building as some of the competition does.

[martinxm]

I think that's the key: get more external links with the "follow" tag. Is that they have many more "follow" links than the rest of competitors (including your client).

[Roman-Delcarmen]

I had the same issue recently, and I, unfortunately, we lost almost 80% of visibility, in my case, the main problem started with, no-index pages, took me a month of manual submissions just to get indexed and until now the crawler starts to recognize the links migrations. At this point, there are 2 possible options optimize the structure of the site (remember best internal structure you have the less external links you will need) or start a link building campaign.....trust me I tried everything and just those options show me some results. As I see the page has over 3K pages indexed so will be a challenging project

[martinxm]

I only have 43 pages...3000 pages its a hard work!

[WebdesignTilburg]

I read about "Fred" since Moz mentioned it in their newsletter yesterday. Two interesting links:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/leticiamiranda/overstockcoms-search-engine-business-is-crumbling-after 
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/fred-update/ 

I guess this sounds familiar and aligns with the period that my client suffered. I don't remember ever reading anything about it, but it might help.