Rank drop in June

[astaelin]

Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point.

Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic.

www.threeguysgolf.com

[astaelin]

I am not sure if anyone uses CloudFlare, but I think it may be to blame. After doing some research, I believe it may be hurting my rankings as it slow TTFB. Just took it off of my blog. I will let you know if things return to normal.

[Searchmgseo]

Sounds like the trust of the domain has been downgraded slightly. What are these big keywords your concerned about? I have a few golf blogs myself.

[EGOL]

As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.

I would try Robert's suggestion.  I would add that word a couple times in the key places that he suggests.  Those are high caliber ammunition....  and cut back a few of the gazillion others.

[EGOL]

Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.

These are the words of a confident and experienced General.

In one of my retail niches, in late June, I saw what appeared to me as rankings boosts for manufacturers and big brand sites.

Manufacturers moved up (probably because their name is mentioned repeatedly on every retail site), even though small specialty sites have greater product breadth (they sell all of the widgets made by several manufacturers) and they also have greater content depth than all of the manufacturers combined.

Big brands who sell one or two widgets moved up, even though lots of small expert sites have greater content area expertise, staff who are available by email or phone, and sell every widget made by every manufacturer.

My personal analysis is... there is nothing wrong with my site... something is wrong with Google.  Carry on!

[astaelin]

Thanks for the feedback. I feel like our on page SEO is pretty good. I recently decided to have index my categories (and have written unique descriptions for them). I always fear that I have done something wrong. I have a few posts that have ranked very well and deliver lots of traffic but have fallen off recently and I don't know why. Maybe it is just natural?

I never really can get my head around Canonical so I am in constant fear I have done something wrong. I trust Yoast SEO is handling it correctly.

As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.

I wish I had a more specific question but honestly I just am wondering why we went from 20% monthly traffic growth to slight decline even though our content has increased regularly.

[RobertFisher]

Adam,

I went to your site and I think it is a good site and you are regularly posting, etc. (I thought I would see it static based on what you said; good job). You could use an H1 about Golf Equipment on the home page since that is what you seem to be about. I am not suggesting this, but at some point you may want to look at url structure re what you are. When you use terms like product-review as opposed to golf-product-reviews or golf-equipment-reviews, you are cheating yourself a bit. Same is true with Title Tags, etc. I don't like to see sites fail to take advantage of what they are.

In your menus have Golf Company Reviews, Improve Your Golf Game etc. as opposed to generics.

As to your dropping a bit, do not get too aggressive over it. Look at traffic and ranking and see if there is a corollary and which way it points. I would not be surprised to see you move up at this point even without change. Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.

Best