Am I thinking in the right direction?

Hi

The main website I do SEO for (which is a friend's website actually) has lost rankings for several of their keywords. Now I know this is not a penalty of any sorts because to the best of my knowledge the falls aren't drastic but they matter to her because of the business impact. So where her lot of her keywords were ranking 1-2 within last 2 months, have dropped to 5-8. This has been a slow fall and it didn't happen overnight either, took almost last 2 months to get to this point.

Now as far as I know no such penalties cause slow and little drop in rankings like above unless I am wrong?

This is the checklist I have created to go through. Please let me know if i am missing something major:

1) I have gone through her on-page stuff and don't see any major changes. In fact the funny thing is compared to just a few months ago, she has got now several viral blog posts from Pinterest.
2) Anchor text ratio. Nothing seems fishy here re perspective of neg SEO.
3) Links. Although the website has thousands of backlinks and most of them are very decent natural links. This is the part where I did notice something that her most powerful 16 links have dropped in the last 2-4 months. There is a natural reason for these links being dropped (as the service is no longer being offered) but it's been in the back of my head as to whether this could have caused this drop in rankings but I don't want to be blindsided by just looking at this links dropped and miss something else that may be happening!
4) Loading Speed of the website is the same as it has been throughout the year.

Anything else I should be looking for?

I'm not an expert, but the backlinks do play a large role in this. Also, check if there are no spam backlinks which may have been made by competitors.

TheGamer said:

her most powerful 16 links have dropped in the last 2-4 months.

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If you lose links, in particular strong ones, then yes, expect rankings to go down; and yes slowly I suppose as google progressively readjusts their evaluation of your site.

Making links should get higher rankings, and losing links should get lower rankings.

So it seems you found the possible cause.

Other than that, as google as the moment is apparently changing many things in their algorithm, the main other thing to check would be to audit your top competitors and try to find anything significantly different in what they do compared to your site.

safeSEOboost said:

If you lose links, in particular strong ones, then yes, expect rankings to go down; and yes slowly I suppose as google progressively readjusts their evaluation of your site.

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Thank you but this is what i have been thinking especially since rankings have gone down slowly over the period of last few weeks.

safeSEOboost said:

Other than that, as google as the moment is apparently changing many things in their algorithm, the main other thing to check would be to audit your top competitors and try to find anything significantly different in what they do compared to your site.

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There is this one website in particular that has risen through the ranks in the last few months. Funnily it's a Turkish company ranking in UK serps for lot of keywords. I think they are using very powerful PBNs as I can't see much through Ahrefs. I don't want to link the website here obviously as it would be really unethical but Is there any tool or any other way to kinda see what they are actually doing?

Do you think your competitor will silent when they know already outranked?
That's you should know before doing deep seo "expert" analysis. Sometime the problem right in front your eyes but you don't see it.

MSRP said:

Do you think your competitor will silent when they know already outranked?

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yes this can be part of the equation too; but as rankings dropped from 1-2 to 5-8, there are probably not 5 competitors who were very aggressive all at once to outrank her. It can be a case of aggressive competitors + a case of losing link power.

MSRP said:

Do you think your competitor will silent when they know already outranked?
That's you should know before doing deep seo "expert" analysis. Sometime the problem right in front your eyes but you don't see it.

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that's a very valid point and i did consider it but there were several keywords where rankings dropped and I just cannot imagine all of the competitors which number in more than a dozen doing aggressive SEO at the same time But like i said in my post just above yours there is one competitor not even from UK who has ranked very aggressively and it's clear that they have used solid PBNs but our drop is more than just one spot!

TheGamer said:

But like i said in my post just above yours there is one competitor not even from UK who has ranked very aggressively and it's clear that they have used solid PBNs but our drop is more than just one spot!

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Then it must be the combination of those two factors. Work on the links to boost your ranking.

1. It must be because of the loss of links (specially if they are of huge authority).
2. Your competitors may be working harder than you.
3. For some niche, if you dont have regular content updation that could also be an issue. Try updating some articles as google loves it.
4. Check also anchor text ratio effect due to the loss of links. May be that could also have some impact.
5. As you have said, your competitors have PBN. Definitely we need to work on this site consistently.

Hey - don't completely write off the idea that Google's latest update shitstorm hasn't had an effect. This sounds like something that happened to one of my clients, and potential new clients have approached me about similar slow-burn rank drops. Primarily UK-based.

There were a lot of search engine updates in August and September. https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates for more about the updates (I'm not affiliated with this website).

The drop off has been quite slow, just general dancing really, but then on the 27th September, rankings for a few higher traffic terms dropped. And I'm talking going from 1-3 to about 5-8. Although my client's link velocity was positive rather than negative, which is the opposite to your situation. It looks like Google have favoured big brands and long established companies vs my client. Despite my client having a shit-hot, super targeted website with good SEO and a big AdWords budget.

Other approaches have confirmed similar. Being knocked down page 1 by big, established brands.

Anyway, just food for thought. But losing quality backlinks certainly won't help your case.