SEO Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?

[EdenPrez]

Hey everyone,

I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information.

I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels.

Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords?

I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that.

Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!

[effectdigital]

Might be business related and not SEO related, did you consider that? If new products dropping can impact SEO - what about removed products?

If removed products are taken down completely from the site (their pages disappear) and / or they are then redirected, obviously those rankings drop significantly or disappear

Certain products are very popular, will bring more traffic to your site. Think about how SEO can inform product stocking choices, help decide what gets added or removed. If stuff is just being deactivated willy-nilly, for products which are highly popular - obviously loss will occur. Doesn't mean things are terribly optimised (though you could probably do some work there, like creating "this product is currently unavailable" pages - which still show product info, but make it clear it's out of stock and maybe give users the option of letting you know that they want it back)

It may just mean, bad decisions were made at the business level - because you were only using SEO as an output, not as an input

[EdenPrez]

This is great insight, thanks for taking the time to reply!

[effectdigital]

Not a problem