Weird SEO Problem - No Longer Ranking in Some Areas

[rswhtn]

Hi Everyone, I’ve got a weird SEO issue that I hope you’ll be able to help with. I’ve broken it down in to the key points below:

• Impressions for our primary and secondary keywords dropped dramatically on 02.10.17.

• Impressions have only dropped on non geographical keywords. “UK” variants are still ranking well. Investigation shows we’re not ranking outside of London at all for primary and secondary keywords.

• Primary and secondary keywords are still ranking well in London, the city where we’re based

• We’ve looked at our competition who do rank for the primary keyword both in and outside London. We noticed we have our “postaladdress” in our schema. The competition don’t have their address in their schema.

• We updated our schema 2 weeks ago and now use the Yoast schema which is the same as our competitors use.

• Approx 1 week after removing the schema we started showing up for primary and secondary keyword again, but very low - fluctuating between page 15 and page 24. It’s been 2 weeks now and no improvement.

• AHREFS and google webmaster, both incorrectly detail that we rank top 5. Which is true to a degree, but only in London.

Thank you in advance!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

I see that you started a previous thread on this topic that received an answer: https://moz.com/community/q/mysterious-location-based-serp-issue

Is there something about your question that wasn't answered?

[rswhtn]

Hi, yes this is similar to my previous question however I think the amount of detail I gave previously proved a little difficult to follow. I've simplified the question here and have intentionally tried to get a more generalised response based on these facts.

If anyone is able to take a look and let me know their thoughts it would be appreciated.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I honestly would love to help with this, but there are just so many variables at play, it is almost impossible to do without an audit of some kind.

There is so much going on that anything thrown at you would be an out-and-out guess, which could land you in a wild goose chase.

However, it does sound similar to a recent client who were actually battling against a penalty due to over optimisation, lack of unique content, similar pages and a less than satisfactory user experience.

However, this only became apparent after looking at the site in depth to find this.

-Andy

[MiriamEllis]

Good for you, Rswhtn, for trying to get your key points into a list. I'm going to agree with Andy here: this list is something you need to take to company that does both local and organic SEO for a real audit. Trying to guess at this, without looking at your timeline, analytics, Google Search Console, competitive landscape, etc., is just going to be making random guesses as to why whatever has happened to your specific business has happened. You could be dealing with filters or penalties, you could be dealing with Google more highly localizing organic results in other places leading to you being edged out of anything but organic rankings for your own city, there could be a technical issue with your robots.txt. It could be so many things. The loss of traffic seems like enough of a reason to get a real audit going for this, so that no more time is being lost with your revenue being impacted.