Tabs in article hurting SEO

I just wanted to share something I discovered.

My website runs on wordpress with the Sahifa theme and I use Visual Composer to spice up my article layouts a bit.

My site ranks quite well for a number of my pages (top 5 spots in google for my targeted keywords).

I recently did a "best of" type article and decided to try something different and use the tabs feature in visual composer to organise the info on my page a bit better. Basically all the info for each item was within a tab. The main review parts were visible by default, but still in a tab.

It was high quality stuff that I had written and great info on the page. But it wouldnt rank - like nowhere in the top 10 pages.

So I just removed all the tabs, and re-organised the content. Still using visual composer, but with no tabs.
Told Google Webmaster tools to fetch the site and index it, and bang - its ranking on the first page. With traffic going to it almost instantly.

Anyone got any other insights into this? I am assuming the way VC handles tabs is not very SEO friendly.

Anyway, just wanted to hopefully help some others with what I learnt.

I forgot where I initially read about it, but Google generally doesn't like carousels, accordions, tabs, or anything that "hides" content.

My initial search for an answer was because I found myself in a similar situation as you; an article of mine was filled with accordions and not ranking well for a long time, but when I removed the accordions, it started ranking well.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html

I read that there's a way of implementing them where it doesn't affect your page's SEO, but I never bothered reading any further on that topic.

Anything that obfuscates the content looks dodgy in the eyes of the big G. I have noticed this as well.