Slowly losing rankings, are backlinks the problem?

Over the past few months our site has been steadily losing organic search traffic. I'm desperately trying to understand why. I've done a lot of work to try and improve our on-page SEO, and now I'm turning my attention to possible external factors. Hopefully someone will be able to provide some insights. Unfortunately I can't provide a link to the site, but I will try and supply as much info as I can.

Our traffic and rankings are steadily dropping by 0.1-0.2 per day in AccuRanker, and the trend from GSC is down over the last 28 days (although hard to see)

GA



AccuRanker



GSC




Website Penalty Indicators suggest we were hit by mobilegeddon, which is confusing as GSC says we're good when it comes to mobile. So I don't know if that's a red herring when looked at alongside our backlink info below.







Here is our Backlink profile from Ahrefs. I'm not really sure how to interpret the data but it looks pretty bad?



Am I right in thinking we need to spend more time working on our backlinks? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Competitors might be ramping up on their SEO efforts and overtaking your position.

cyrusv said:

Competitors might be ramping up on their SEO efforts and overtaking your position.

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That is certainly a possibility. What annoys me though is our main competitor seems to have broken all the rules when it comes to SEO but consistently outranks us.

Hates said:

That is certainly a possibility. What annoys me though is our main competitor seems to have broken all the rules when it comes to SEO but consistently outranks us.

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You're not alone.

Collect good DA websites where you can create backlinks for your website,you will have good backlinking power.

It looks like you are bleeding backlinks (ref domains, the red bars). Are you using GSA to link directly to the site? For whatever reason, you are losing backlinks. Build more to make up for the link loss.

I was just going to ask what types of links they were, looks like you need more "sticky" links.

accelerator_dd said:

Are you using GSA to link directly to the site?

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Sorry, I don't know what GSA means What should I be doing?

Hates said:

Sorry, I don't know what GSA means What should I be doing?

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GSA Ser is a nice piece of software. Check it out.

accelerator_dd said:

It looks like you are bleeding backlinks (ref domains, the red bars). Are you using GSA to link directly to the site? For whatever reason, you are losing backlinks. Build more to make up for the link loss.

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I'm guessing he buys a lot of PBN posts then.

Almost all bought PBN links are sites where the builder buys one year's hosting and then fills the site with links in a few months... and then abandons the website and lets the hosting expire. This is the most profitable for the builder because he saves on renewing hosting and then has buyers like the OP who constantly need to replace dead links they've lost.

Your alternative would be to only use paid PBN links as T2, or to look for PBN sellers who advertise as buying multiple years of hosting up-front (which is rare).