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Help with catastrophic fall in rankings
Posted by on September 3, 2024 at 3:50 pmHi all,
My Shopify website has had a catastrophic fall in rankings for collection (PLP) pages since this April. Just to be clear our organic traffic was being driven by collection pages not product pages, for key search terms
Our organic traffic report on Ahrefs shows how traffic has gone from monthly volumes of 40k + to now approx 10k for collection page URLS.
Our website has been live for 10 years with a healthy domain authority of 38 (ahrefs). For Q1 this year our rankings were the best they have ever been with 1-5 positions for a variety of high volume target keywords.
So what on earth has happened?
- The drop off coincides with a new refreshed Shopify theme being launched on the site where homepage, product page and collection pages were visually updated.
- There was code change implemented across the board to improve the look, feel and function of the site with the aim of increasing the sites conversion rate. This has worked – conversion rate gone from 3.6% to 4% monthly average since the changes
- Our rankings have dropped across the board, it's not been related to one particular keyword area, it's all phrases.
- We are being outranked by players with much lower DA and poor content
- Our hunch is that something technical has changed on site since our front end designer updated the theme. He cannot pinpoint anything
- One idea we had is that the collection pages previously were being handled natively by Shopify. As part of the improved design we had to use a 3rd part App – Globo to handle the rendering of the collection page and products. We are currently working with our designer to revert back to a native Shopify collection page, albeit still using the official Shopify App to help with product filtering.
It feels like a switch has literally been switched and google just can't figure something out about our website anymore.
Our website speed needs improvement but it always has. And our competitors broadly speaking, are no better. Our hunch is that while content always needs improvement, it's not bad and certainly again on a par with the many competiors who are now outranking us. We've not had any manual actions either just to be clear on that front.
If there are any Shopify tech SEOs who want more details and would be interested in a one off project then we are all ears. Just drop me a DM.
Otherwise it would be great to hear any general thoughts about where you would start. If you need any further info just let me know and I'll provide. Just won't be able to mention URLS etc publicly for obvious reasons.
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1 Reply
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I would need to see the collection pages. I had a client have this happen. We just redesigned the collection pages, built more content and improved internal links. But I would need to look over your website. If you can DM me the URL I’m happy to look it over and give advice.
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