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Thanks Samuel! - That's an excellent list.

In terms of SEO Metrics, a lot has changed in recent times due to the difficulty with gathering the required information (not provided) and how the overall industry is shifting.

Would you have any recommendations on metrics you would report to clients on a monthly basis?

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Thanks Chris - I would like to see specifically the traffic from local listings such as Yelp, Google Places, map listings etc.

I presume I will just have to manually check the referral traffic?

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Hi Doug,

Thanks for chipping in your thoughts.

The site appears to be still ranking high for several of its target keywords, but it's lost a considerable amount of traffic for longer tail keywords.

It doesn't appear that the site is facing any new competitors (Ireland is a small market after-all, and the company hasn't been doing any form of outreach/link building.

To me it seems the problem has to be something which was changed on their side, which again brings up the point flagged by Robert about the aggregated reviews.

Within WMT there have been no messages received either, and I've checked to see if noindex or robots rules have changed...pages losing tracking code etc..and not noticed any issues there.

Hi Robert,

Excellent answer- Many thanks for offering your input.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Analytics accounts of other sites my client is referring to, so it's difficult to validate that statement he made. As this review content isn't actually placed on the actual pages of my clients site, is Google capable of acknowledging it as duplicate content? Is it even crawlable within its current form?

It doesn't appear that my client has been doing any form of link building with the site having relatively few linking root domains. Also in terms of on-page copy, they have been adding unique copy per product on the site.

The aggregated reviews could potentially be the main issue but it does seem to be a very quick drop in traffic if they had only been added a couple of weeks ago. I do agree with you though that they should be getting their own consumer base to submit reviews, even if the volume of them won't be as comprehensive.

Thanks for the response Federico.

I've 301'd every page on the old site to the relevant page on the new website, rather than 301'ing the entire domain to the homepage which would be bad practice.

At least with subdirectories, within WMT I've been able to geotarget /UK/ to the UK, and /IE/ to Ireland.