Rankings Dropped to Nothing

[Jbyron]

We're kind of in crisis mode, as our ad revenue is about to take a huge hit. Hoping someone can help me figure out what to do next.

Site: https://indoorgardening.com

Here's what I did (below) that I think broke things somehow. I'm clearly not an SEO expert but thought I was making things better. And things did improve over the last week or so but then fell apart 2 days ago.

1. Most posts did not have a Yoast focus keyword. I added keyword phrases and used Yoast suggestions to optimize for that and for readability.

2. In some cases I changed post titles to better reflect the keyword phrase.

3. In some cases I changed the slug per Yoast's suggestion and did a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one.

4. I used Grammarly to fix all spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.

5. Some Yoast-suggested changes that were made: Image alt tags, subheading structures, adding keyword to subheadings, first paragraph, and meta description, changed sentence length for those over 20 words to clean up the text, added transition words where applicable, reworded passive voice sentences, added internal links when needed, eliminated consecutive sentences (first word), improved Flesch reading ease when necessary.

6. I also added or changed Amazon affiliate links where needed and swapped out images when necessary.

Results:
I started this project about 3 weeks ago. On 11/29 we had one of our highest traffic days, with 1017 hits coming from Google. On 11/30, 257 hits came from Google, and on 12/1, 3 (three!!) hits came from Google.

At this point, 82 of 89 posts have a double green "Good" score in Yoast; 6 are "OK" and 1 does not have a focus keyword designated.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide.

-John

[mikeyqu]

Hey John,

I actually think this might be an Analytics issue, or at least it's something you might want to investigate before jumping to the SEO conclusion. Check your site using Google Tag Assistant - it looks like there are three Analytics tags competing with each other right now.

If you happen to be using a property that's been dialed back recently, you might be seeing incorrect traffic numbers.

Check that your Analytics is correct first - you might be alright on SEO right now - I'm not immediately seeing anything else that would result in such a rapid traffic loss from organic search.

xkJQHfa

[Jbyron]

Thanks so much Mike. It actually turned out to be a bad plugin update causing the issue. Took a while to figure that out, but we're good now. Why these plugin authors don't test more before rolling out updates, I'll never know.

Thanks again!

John