Website is Dropping in PR

[RENDEV]

Hey there.

I'm new here at our company, and I'm working on SEO for a website we are working on (www.greenthumbdepot.com). We are doing some link-building (forums, articles, blogs, directory submissions, etc) and are currently trying to find some good quality links, as well. After 3 months, the site was on page 15 for the search term "hydroponics nutrients" on Google, and on the first pages of organic search for Bing and Yahoo!. However, looking again, our website has disappeared from the first 50 pages of Google (according to SEOMOZ).

From what I can see, the incoming links are not spammy, and the articles we have been submitting have been driving a small amount of traffic to the site. Are we doing something incredibly wrong here? We've changed the meta tags a couple of nights ago.

I'm a noob here, so please go easy on me! I'm learning... so thanks for any advice you can give.

-jen

[RENDEV]

Thank you so much for your response! That is definitely something for us to think about.

[eTundra]

If you type "hydroponics nutrients" into SEOMoz'a Keyword Difficulty Tool you'll see that this is a pretty competitive keyword.  The only domains to rank in the top 10 results with a DA of less than 40 have an exact or partial match to the keyword in their root domain.

Your DA is 12 which means that you probably should not have been ranking so highly (even on page 2) for such a competitive keyword.  It's possible Google was giving your site a test run higher up in the SERPs because it's a new site and then dropped you back down to where you should have been all along.

You need to continue your link building efforts (with much more focus on premium content and social networking) and wait - probably for a long time - until you build up your link profile and DA.

In the meantime, start going after less competitive long tail keyword terms that still relate to your website and product.  Try researching keywords with 3+ words that get any kind of traffic according to the Exact Match Local column in Google's Keyword Tool.  Write articles and optimize pages on your site targeting these keywords.  If you put enough of them together you'll start driving some significant traffic to your site while you continue to work towards ranking for the big main keywords.