Weird SEO Problem - No Longer Ranking in Some Areas

[RSWHTN]

Hi Everyone, I’ve got a weird SEO issue that I hope you’ll be able to help with. I’ve broken it down in to the key points below:

- Impressions for our primary and secondary keywords dropped dramatically on 02.10.17.

- Impressions have only dropped on non geographical keywords. “UK” variants are still ranking well. Investigation shows we’re not ranking outside of London at all for primary and secondary keywords.

- Primary and secondary keywords are still ranking well in London, the city where we’re based

- We’ve looked at our competition who do rank for the primary keyword both in and outside London. We noticed we have our “postaladdress” in our schema. The competition don’t have their address in their schema.

- We updated our schema 2 weeks ago and now use the Yoast schema which is the same as our competitors use.

- Approx 1 week after removing the schema we started showing up for primary and secondary keyword again, but very low - fluctuating between page 15 and page 24. It’s been 2 weeks now and no improvement.

- AHREFS and google webmaster, both incorrectly detail that we rank top 5. Which is true to a degree, but only in London.

Thank you in advance!

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Can you provide the site in question? It's near impossible to give you any real feedback without knowing what site to look at.

 

[RSWHTN]

Hi Eric, thanks very much for the reply. I’ve included the link below:

https://goo.gl/Kiu7hs

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for the link, that helps a lot. Looks like you are international, not locally focused correct?

Thanks for the PM, I wish I could help but I'm tied up the rest of the week.
Now that folks have a link to look at hopefully you'll get some good feedback.

 

[RSWHTN]

Thanks for the reply Linda!

Yes that's right, we're not locally focused. Our customers are mainly here in the UK although we do have some customers overseas. We're not necessarily trying to rank internationally though, we're only targeting the UK.

We were ranking all across the UK for "clothing manufacturers" but something has changed so now we're only ranking for "clothing manufacturers uk" across the country. We are showing up very low in SERP anywhere other than London. In London though, we're currently position 2.

Our aim is to get the non location specific keywords - "clothing manufacturers", "clothes manufacturers" etc. to be ranking high all across the UK, not just in London.

I've attached an image from webmaster tools which shows how our impressions from "clothing manufacturers" dropped. After seeing this, we changed our schema so it no longer includes "postal address".

Prior to the drop we were ranking for this keyword all over the UK. After the drop we're only ranking for it in London, no where else.