Impact of May 2015 quality update and July Panda update on specialty brands or niche retail

[drewk]

We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react.

Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers.

In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10.

The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us.

So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see.

So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough.

Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, this is an incredibly complex situation (in many cases) with no easy answer. Unlike a penalty or typical Panda update, this sounds more like a signal change favoring one type of site over another (one set of signals over another). I'm not going to say "big brands", because that carries a lot of assumptions and baggage, but there are certainly signals that tend to be correlated with more powerful brands.

If Google really just decided to change their preference, there's not a lot to be done. You may have done nothing wrong, per se, and it's hard to fix something that isn't broken. In that case, you've got a few options, SEO-wise:

(1) Hunt for greener pastures. You may have to find new, long-tail keywords where the bigger brands aren't playing. This is a big project beyond the scope of Q&A, but there are cases where you do need to go after new targets.

(2) Re-evaluate your keywords based on impact/traffic/conversion instead of ranking. It's possible, in some cases, that big brands could dominate the Top 5, but that, for some reason, you're still getting decent CTR on certain keywords. Do that analysis before you give up on these keywords.

(3) Hang in there. Sorry, it sounds like lame advice, but these kinds of updates often go back and forth, and you could see Google tweaking the mix over the next few months. In other words, whatever tactical shifts you make, don't completely cut off the pages/tactics that were ranking before (just in case).

All of that said, it's often the case that the situation is a bit grayer, and Google has made this shift because of quality issues it saw across a large number of sites. It's hard to speak in generalities, but Panda updates have gradually been harder on certain types of pages, like product categories, because these are often fairly thin (search results, etc.). If all of the smaller players took a similar approach, it's possible you all got devalued at once, and there may be a way to fix that.

Unfortunately, that kind of fix is really hard to advise on without at least some sense of the keywords/pages in question. I guess my main point is that it's easy to say "Google gave big brands all the rankings!" and see red, which can make you miss the few things you might have power to change.