Ranking Drops

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I'm seeing a few category pages drop out of Google for certain keywords but not others, I'm trying to work out why & see if this correlates to a drop in conversion

Organic Traffic isnt down, but conversion is so I'm trying to identify where its coming from - a lot has come from the homepage, but we have also lost a lot of positions across the site.

has anyone noticed any google updates in Jan?

Example of the page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/shelving-racking

Keywords lost in top 10 UK Google:

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| racking shelving |
| shelving racking |
| racking shelves |
| industrial shelving unit |
| racking storage |
| shelf racking |
| shelving units industrial |
| industrial pallet racking |
| shelf racking system |

[daniel-brooks]

Hi Becky,

Without really investigating this it's hard to find an exact reason as to why you're experiencing ranking drops. You're right to check for any recent algo updates, but if there was something large - the entire SEO and digital marketing community would be losing their minds now.

If I were you, I'd take some time to analyse the pages that have experienced the ranking drops, looking into the following areas:

• Check for algorithm updates (which you've done)
• Run your site and URLs through Page Speed Insights and make sure that there are no serious errors highlighted. If there are, make sure you get them fixed ASAP.
• Check that Google can actually see those pages, making sure that there aren't any nofollow, noindex tags in place
• Log into your Google Search Console account and check for any crawl errors, indexing errors & sitemap faults etc
• Run a crawl of your site in a tool such as Screaming Frog and check for any 404's, 302's and any redirect loops that may need to be addressed
• Do a full backlink analysis to make sure that any links pointing to your site are relevant and not spammy. Any low quality links pointing to your site, whether you built them recently or years ago will be having a negative effect
• I noticed that the URLs on your site don't use a trailing slash at the end. However, when I manually add a trailing slash, both URLs are showing as '200 OK' meaning that these can be considered as two different pages, which can cause confusion to Googlebot. I'd recommended making sure that any URLs that include a trailing slash are automatically redirected to the version without one - implement that site wide.
• Also, should a user search a URL on your site with a capital letter in the URL - they are being directed to a '404 Error' page. Implement a site wide redirection to make sure that any URLs that include a capital letter are then redirected to the correct lowercase version. For example: http://www.yoursite.com/proDuct > http://www.yoursite.com/product

I'm sure there are a few other areas that you can look into but hopefully that provides you with a good basis.

Best of luck