Sudden substantial drop in rankings - no manual penalty so far as I can see.

[Fitnesssavvy]

Hey,

Wondering if anyone can help. There are a few things within this query, specific to our site, so thought I would group it all together in one post, as they are no doubt all connected.

I’ve been working on SEO for my price comparison website for the last year or so.

https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk

However, our rankings have not noticeably improved since we first started ranking in Google around 6-9 months ago. I have been building high DA links to the site, getting the on-page SEO perfect according to Yoast, Squirrly and Moz on-page checker, site speed for the pages I want to rank for is better than the competition on page 1 etc. I can see things like our Protein Calculator on page 1 of Bing, and Exercise Bikes on page 4. So the work I am doing seems to be having an effect there at least.

However, in Google it just seems static. In fact, January should be the best time for our site. Searches on our keywords double around now. Since 2^nd January there has been a huge drop in organic traffic to our site according to Google Analytics. Checked Search Console, and as suspected, massive drop. Lowest average position and impressions for the last 3 months. We were having around 1,200-2,000 impressions per day with an average ranking of 35-45. Now 600 impressions per day with ranking of 75. I thought I would leave it a few days before posting on here to see if there was any improvement but unfortunately there hasn't been.

We had our 3 best days in a row at the end of December, in regards to organic traffic before the drop off. Thought this was a sign of what was to come in January, so needless to say I am gutted that our visibility in the search engines seems to have gone at the most important time of year for our site.

We have no manual penalty, I have looked to see if there are any algorithm updates and have not seen anything, nothing fundamentally has changed with our site.

The only potentially significant thing that happened at the start of January was that we released our first press release. This was done through PRWeb, and has been published in a few places, so there was a jump in links back to our site – all no follow links.

Our DA according to Moz actually increased a couple of days ago from 23 to 25. This does not take into account a lot of recent backlinks which Google Search Console is showing from high DA sites – one of which is a .gov directory with Moz DA of 100, and some bloggers I reached out to with DA's ranging from 40-50. So, if anything, I would assume our rankings would increase and then even more traffic to arrive at our site due to the time of year.

On Ahrefs, the number of organic keywords we rank for was 1,800 about 4 months ago and now 2,200. We were ranked 18,000,000 or so a few months back, we are now 4,700,000 based on our backlink profile. So while there has been an increase in keywords we rank for, it is not substantial given the amount of work on the SEO side of things I have been doing.

Interestingly, the only thing we rank for is our article on top personal trainers for 2017. And the ranking for this seems unaffected during the recent drop:

https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk/best-online-personal-trainer-websites/

This article was produced with the intention of securing links back from those we listed. However, it is now ranked page 1 of Google for numerous keywords – regardless of the fact that on page SEO was non-existent, there are no links back to that page, the page authority is terrible etc. By all accounts, this page should not be ranking like it is - especially given the keyword difficulty (25) compared to most of the other "low-hanging fruit" keywords we are looking to rank on (0-20).

Needless to say, after thousands of hours of link building, on page SEO, research, learning, and investment into tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, Squirrly, Yoast etc, investment in developers to help improve page load speeds, I am feeling defeated.

Any advice on the following would be much appreciated:

1. Why might this page for personal trainers be ranking so well? Page speed is horrendous – 40 on mobile and 38 on desktop. Much lower than any other on page 1. The only thing I can see which is different about this page is the number of social shares. This page also links out to lots of external “relevant” site, so maybe that is having a strong effect. There is about 1 external link per 150 words or so.
2. If we were to receive a manual penalty for some reason from Google, would this be issued before/at the same time as the drop in rankings, or could this have happened but we have simply not been notified yet?
3. Why, after nearly a year of link building has there been very little increase in traffic? I would have expected to rank significantly better with the amount of high quality, high DA sites we now have linking to us which were not there 6 months ago. Our domain is nearly a year old. From what I read, domain age doesn't play a huge role, but maybe this is a reason why we are still not ranking for very much. I am hoping that this is the main reason - that we are less than a year old, and that once we've been around more than 12 months there will be an improvement.
4. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the site, or what I am doing which is negatively affecting it? I’ve disavowed a few spammy sites that link back to us, but maybe I should be doing more?
5. I’ve tried just about everything with link building that I have read up on – guest blogging, directory listings, forums, producing valuable "linkable" content, resource pages, ego bait etc. Do I continue in this way and just keep chipping at it and rest assured that rankings – at some point – will improve?
6. What would your advice be, regarding what I should prioritise to start seeing results?

Many thanks in advance,

Robin.

[GlennFerrell]

You have a big site in a competitive market and it looks like you are doing many of the right things. However, one thing I noticed is that many of the major categories (such as Fitness Education) "Exercise Bikes", "Body Building", etc. have no H1s -- or in some cases an H1 at the bottom of the page. Some, like exercise bikes, have that major keyphrase embedded in an image (where it can't be seen by googlebot). The few others I browsed were in h5s.  It's very important to have an H1 on each page (better near the top) - but especially important on the key category pages for the phrases people are likely to search on.

My advice is to temporarily move your effort from link building to a focus on on-page SEO (even tho I'll guess the Personal Trainers page ranks well partially because of the 15 or so links it must have sucked in.) I'm assuming that you want to rank for major keyphrases that most people would search on. Pick a small set to focus on. For example, those under categories, fitness education, etc. Each of those phrases should have a page or post, with an H1 and other subordinate content connected up through things like breadcrumbs (which you are using), on page links, etc.

In some cases this may take some WP development on templates, custom post types, etc. Also visit Yoast suggestions on a page by page basis - they are generally pretty good.

[Fitnesssavvy]

Hey thanks. This does not explain the reason for not improving over nearly a year of link building, and actually slipping considerably this last week or so, as we have done lots of on page optimisation on hundreds of pages so I know that cannot be the main issue.

Here is an example:

This page was ranking 20th 9 months ago. Now 90th or so. perfect on page SEO according to everything - 99% on here (only internal links from menus etc taking it over 100). Our DA was 1 when we were ranking on page 2. Now 25 and we are on page 9 or so.

https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk/product/phd-diet-whey-2kg/

There are no links back to the personal trainers page. On page SEO for the personal trainers page says 69% on Moz, and is showing that lots of work needs to be done for the keyword "best online personal trainers". Page speed is horrendous. Keyword difficulty 25. Yet we are 5th. Sending lots of traffic to personal trainers who are no doubt making sales while no other pages of ours are ranking well at all. This page brings in more traffic then the other 5,000 or so combined pretty much. And it only has a few hundred searches per month compared with millions of searches on all the other keywords on our site.

https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk/best-online-personal-trainer-websites/

I have no idea where to put my efforts as not only are rankings not improving, but are slipping considerably.

Any advice from anyone who can see what this issue is, as it must be something pretty big