Competitor Inverse Relationship

[rastellop]

Please take a look at the attached images which show the apparently inverse relationship between one of our top competitors (purple trace) and us (blue trace). There seems to be a fairly clear correlation, we're just left wondering what could have happened to cause this.

It seems clear that the 'purple' team was termporarily able to beat us out on the keywords we were working on, but a few questions arise:

1. Did the purple team beat us out, or did we screw something up?

2. If they beat us out, what on earth did they do because it clearly wasn't content creation (they have a skimpy site with no blog and their Alexa score is almost identical to ours

3. We took some steps to fix our situation including:

4. Page optimization

5. website speed improvement

6. Blog review and update

7. You can see from the second graph (rankings) that our keyword rankings slid starting may/2018 along with our traffic, but we regained our footing a year later (now).

8. I guess the big questions are:

9. were there black hat tactics at play here?

10. If so, what were they likely to be?

11. did the problem go away because the purple team stopped paying someone for these results?

12. Was it our fault but we fixed it?

13. what is the most likely reason for this problem?

14. Could it have been a Google  algorithm update? Which one?

Anyway, any insight that you can give would be appreciated.

-- PeteR

FHM1Sn0

[effectdigital]

Wouldn't be possible to draw any kinds of conclusions with such top-line data. From this post, we don't know what the keywords are or which websites were involved in these movements. We'd want to be looking at actual keywords, looking in the WayBack machine to see how content on both sites changed, looking in Ahrefs to see if there are any matching link trends for either site

Alexa score is ancient I wouldn't be looking at it any more to be honest. Regardless, it's not possible to check for black-hat attacks on "purple line" or "blue line", we need domains here!

If you want a comprehensive audit of exactly what happened, no one can supply it for 'mystery' websites based on a couple of charts

You're also looking at things in a very binary way. How do you know they didn't do something good **when **you screwed something up? Why does it have to be one or the other? In SEO usually there are a convergence of factors surrounding such large movements!