Drop in Keyword Rankings (SEMRush)

Hello,

My website's keywords have dropped in ranking, and I'm not sure how to go about diagnosing this issue? A couple of weeks ago, we did some "cleanup" in which we 301 redirected some of our low quality material to quality replacement pages, is it possible this had a negative impact on my rankings? I wouldn't think so because the pages we got rid of had no traffic going to them anyway. What would be my first steps to getting these words to rank higher again?

It might be for Penguin effect. Still i am seeing dancing for my keywords also. Not stable yet so you can wait a little bit. And yes start checking your link profile again. This time no penalization from Google via Penguin update. They just devalue the links for which you are ranked. Maybe that's why your rank is dropped. Try to create some more powerful links for your previously ranked keyword and landing page. Hope you will get back your rank again.

Are you redirecting internal links? If so, you shouldn't, just point the links directly to your new pages.