What could be causing our rankings to drop?

[HeatandPlumb]

This post is deleted!

[RyanKent]

I can't speak to what caused your rankings to drop, but I definitely see opportunities in your on-page factors which can improve your ranking.

Each page on your site should be optimized for about 2 keywords or phrases. For each page you need to determine "what keyword searches do I want this page to attract?" Be careful with your choices. You want to think of things from a user's perspective. What type of information do users want to find when they type in "radiators" or any given term in their search criteria. If you grab search traffic that you shouldn't, your bounce rate will be high and search engines may take that as an indicator your site is not a good result for the given query.

Your home page's title is "Heat and Plumb | Heating and Plumbing Supplies, Materials and Plumbing Fittings". That title seems to be a bit broad, as if you are trying to capture too much. I would suggest using a title more along the lines of "Heating and Plumbing Supplies | Heat and Plumb". The keywords first, then your company name. The shorter the title, the more weight each word or phrase will have.

Your home page seems to cover too many keywords. You use "radiators" 8 times on the home page. The first use is great as it is a single term link to another page which can send the signal that your home page is not the proper landing page for "radiators", but then you use the term 7 more times on the page. Perhaps you can scale back a bit, otherwise you may be cannibalizing your own site's ranking.

Your best page for the "radiator" keyword seems to be: http://www.heatandplumb.com/acatalog/Radiators_and_Towel_Rails.html. You have a link from your home page to this page. Your current title is "Radiators For Sale BIG Range with Price Match Guarantee!". I would suggest keeping the extra text in your meta description. As a title I would recommend either "Radiators" or "Radiators | HeatandPlumb.com". By removing the extra "fluff" words you are focusing your title power on the keyword.

I confirmed you show as the 9th result for radiators in google.co.uk. All of the results above yours either have shorter titles, or repeat the "radiator" term. Some also have the term in their main URL.

I don't want to paint the picture that these changes will propel you to #1, but they can definitely make a difference in what is clearly a highly competitive term.

[HeatandPlumb]

Hi Ryan - thanks for your detailed response!

I think I am right in interpreting your response... basically saying that our Homepage may be taking 'power' away from the landing page we want to rank for the term.

I will definitely give your suggestions a try and see if it has a good effect!

I realise this is a very broad question, but what other factors can you see that might have caused our sites ranking for various keywords to drop over the last few months? For example,we've got a good domain authority, good page authority, nice number of links, fairly good on-page optimisation (your changes noted), pretty decent bounce rate for our sector I would suggest... what else could see us slipping down the rankings for many of our terms?

[RyanKent]

Going forward, begin a Campaign using the SEO moz tools. Track every major keyword and phrase, along with your major competitors.

Without a very thorough analysis of your site, your competitors and the keywords involved I am guessing. If it was only a couple of positions we could look at competitors improving their SEO, but you have lost too many positions for that to be the case. If your site was under a penalty, you should lose more rankings then you did.

There are two possibilities I can think of:

1. Your site lost considerable linking authority. This could happen because an authorative site(s) stopped linking to you, or those links were devalued by Google.

2. An algorithmic change was made by Google (they make about 500 per year) which negatively affected your site, or positively affected numerous other sites while not affecting your site.

In either case, your position is basically not "getting back what you lost' but using basic SEO strategy to climb the ranks. Look very closely at your site and the top sites. Determine where you can improve.

Perhaps other mozzers will share some additional ideas.

[EGOL]

Your question has a focus on the term "radiators".

Is your ranking drop confined to that term or have you experienced a drop in rankings on most of the sites pages?

Also, did this rankings drop occur on a specific date?  If you don't watch your rankings closely then look at your traffic logs and see if traffic took a sudden drop on specific date(s).

[HeatandPlumb]

Hi EGOL,

Comparing our traffic for that term to the previous year, we saw a 5%-ish drop every year around March (seasonally, people don't want raidators when it's warm so thats fair). However, this year on or around March 21st we saw a massive hit, which continued into the beginning of April. This affected many of our key landing pages such as Boilers, Radiators, Bathrooms, Shower Enclosures etc. In this time we did not make a major change to the site, but continued to use the SEO practices that had always worked for us.

This makes me think it's down to an algorithmic change from Google but according to many SEO tools and people in the business, the things we are doing are correct, and our site is 'stronger' than our competition.

It is just very frustrating when our business has relied upon our strong positions in Google - and we haven't rested on our laurels - but it's as if we have been penalised.

Sorry for the moan and thanks for your advice so far!

[RyanKent]

You previously mentioned the drop happened in "the last month or so". If it happened back in March that is in alignment with the Panda time frame. The update hit the US in late February if I recall correctly. I realize you are in the UK. I am not familiar with the details on how those in Europe were affected.

Take a look at this article on the Panda update. Try to use the suggested methods to gather more details. The troubleshooting steps would be helpful even if your site was affected by a different issue.

[EGOL]

As Ryan explains, since your rankings drop is not confined to one keyword it could be related to the Panda Update but I don't think that it hit the UK SERPs until April 11.  more about the Panda Update timeline