Positions dropped and do not recover

[rudolfl]

Hi all,

Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au

k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at)

About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine)

As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again.

I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong.

Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of.

Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much.

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Rudolf

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[thinkLukeSEO]

I have pretty much the same issue with one of my clients websites. It was ranking no.5 for a highly prized keyword, after a redesign to mobile friendly, kept URLs, redirects etc, improved content, https and "best practises" etc our rankings continue to drop. wtf.

I had a look at your site and it seems to be optimised how I would approach SEO also... long form SEO text, keywords in h1, h2, alt, meta etc.

I also saw that https://www.fashionaddict.com.au/hair-fascinators.html ranks no.1 without long form seo text. Again wtf?

And http://www.fascinators.net/ ranks no.2 with a similar structure to your site.

The main difference I noticed is you mention "fascinators" a lot in headings, which does seem a bit unnatural, maybe even spammy. I believe I do that also on my clients website... causing it to drop.

What are your backlinks like compared to the competition?

[rudolfl]

Thank you for replying.

Backlinks are the issue and this is the main reason I got external SEO agency to step in. They are working specifically on link building.

Is there any way to do a "health check" for keyword spamming? I already removed a lot of those, but selling fascinators it is difficult not to use the word a lot.

And yes, I looked at competition also -- In mot respects I beleive my site is a better fit, but Google obviously thinks otherwise for some reason.

Rudolf