Loss of search visibility-consecutive drops in one month - something I did or competitors?

[SueMclean]

I am fairly new to Moz. I co-manage a  national website with about 400 common pages and separate location areas for cities in Australia. 1 city starting their own separate website a year ago. A drop in search visibility of the whole national site and my location page started in mid July according to Moz stats.-  8%>12%>$38% consecutive drops per week. In google analytics the organic search has dropped 8% overall & 2% on my location page in last month.

I did minor optimisation to the my page and articles using Moz in July - upped H2 to H1 title, tweaked main keyword, wrote slightly different SEO title and included keywords in body copy. The rankings of the target keywords went up but other keyword rankings went down.   The other thing that started in June was Facebook advertising of our blog articles (click-throughs have a high bounce rate of 95%). The office with its own website (with a similar brand name) also started doing Facebook advertising and SEO for it earlier this year. I can see their own website traffic really shot up in June/July, and they also maintained their traffic on the national site. Wondering if any of these are causing the drop, or if this is more an indicator of competitor activity or alogorthms? Any ideas about causes and solutions appreciated.

[JordanLowry]

I believe the on page content could be causing an issue. If these 400 pages have similar content then that could be the issue.

However, in July there were some algorithm updates from Google but these appear to be mostly centered around Mobile Speed Updates. But if you have a mobile site with reasonable load times you should be fine.

But, what I'd want to know is how unique is the content on those 400 pages?

[SueMclean]

Hi Jordan, Thanks for your response. Moz has flagged 5 pages with duplicate content, 2 new which I have redirected. When I look at the others, they aren't actually duplicated eg "Careers" has 141 "associated" pages but none of them are actually similar eg "subscribe to our newsletter".  Re speed, I ran a report which says it is slightly under par - all content loads in 6 secs, all scripts load in 16. Any further thoughts appreciated.