Our law firm's site traffic recently dropped off right before the holidays, conveniently at the same time we switched from All in One SEO to WordPress SEO by Yoast.

[marketingdepartment.ch]

The drop seems lower than last year, and our conversions are currently down. We are currently in one of our busy seasons and we are not picking up as quickly as we'd like. The plugin was installed November 25th, which is around the same time that our traffic typically slows due to the holidays. I'm not sure if this could be contributing to the lower and possibly less qualified leads. Our rankings are down for a few keywords, but not all. Any insight or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

WordPress SEO was also giving us some trouble (and still is) with rewriting title tags. The titles were only being rewritten in the SERPs, not in the source code. I went to customer support with this and they blamed it on Google not liking the titles we have, which does not seem true because they were never rewritten with All in One.

I was just wondering if anyone else has seen this sort of issue with WordPress SEO by Yoast? We have a rather large site, so switching back to All in One would really need to be an educated decision.

[CommT]

Have you checked the site in the Panguin tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/)? I would do that before you blame a plugin! Not saying it definitely isn't that but check it wasn't an algo update first.

Good luck

Amelia

[LauraSultan]

I doubt it has anything to do with the Yoast plugin unless your settings are not optimal. Given the timing, you may have been affected by the Penguin 3.0 update that hit around Thanksgiving. See http://searchengineland.com/holidays-google-breaks-updates-rules-gives-fresh-penguin-updates-210367 for details.  You'll need to do a backlink audit to be sure. Use the Panguin tool to compare your Analytics to Google algorithm updates.

Google does sometime change titles in the SERPs when they deem it appropriate, so the customer support response that you got was likely accurate.

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Definitely not blaming, just trying to weigh in all factors that changed at that point. Thank you for your advice, looking into it now!

[marketingdepartment.ch]

Thank you very much for your advice, looking into it now. As far as the titles being changed, I get that Google tends to rewrite them when they're not optimal, but it's a little confusing to me how they were not rewritten while using All In One (they were the exact same,) and only changed after Yoast was installed.

Thanks again!

[JVRudnick]

As others have said, yeah..most likely NOT the plugin...but with that timing you may need to check on the Penguin update in Dec....

That said a gentle reminder -- that ALL SEO plugins are tools one uses to make changes to the site pages and NOT strategy items that need development first....ie they do what they're told...YOU need to know what to do on your own!

ie you can surely change a title tag - but from what to what at how long and keywords in what order etc etc - no WP plugin can help with that, eh!

[Travis_Bailey]

This is really only based on ~five minutes of messing around with SEM Rush, but it looks like some of your competitors have taken a little bit of a hit - to a greater or lesser degree. However, there is at least one actual competitor that appears to have increased their share quite a bit in that time.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say Grossman Justice should be on your radar, if it isn't already. Yep. Sometimes it's just plain old competition.

Though I would probably revisit some of those guest posts on your site, done in 2012. They're pretty exact match anchor friendly. That might not be a terribly good thing. It wouldn't hurt to possibly nofollow those links.

Another thing that's a little strange and could be fixed easily is the 'Office Details' text on the contact page. It almost blends in with the background button. I don't think this is hurting much, it just looks bad. A little CSS tweak and you're looking good, at least on that point.

Though I would wonder who built thousands of links with the anchor text 'lawyer'. A lot of that happened hot prior to August 2014.

Without rambling on much more, I'm trying to say there are a lot of factors. Some of the little problems on your site, once fixed, can add up to bigger wins. Plus your competition has caught up to you. I don't think it's the plugin change, at least not at the moment.