Website keeps dropping in ranking with no visible penalty.

[GipsyDharma]

Hi everyone!

I would really appreciate your help on this!

The website URL is: www.gipsydharma.com

It has now been over a year, but we're finding it very difficult to start ranking for any useful keywords. Some keywords like: leather boots / boots for women / handmade clothing at some point went up to page 20, but have now dropped again below page 50. Now, most of our traffic comes from social media so the business is going OK. But the question still remains, what does Google have against the above URL? Its not a super amazing website, but it provides unique and engaging content and has zero spam. I also don't think its over optimized, but I may be wrong on this. Recently, I've also noticed that the Domain Authority has also been going down, it was 46 at some point and now its 40.

There's no visible penalty and all the pre-Penguin links (of which there weren't that many, I think) were cleaned up months ago, without Google suggesting that. There are very few keyword rich backlinks and a lot of them come naturally anyways.

So again, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[GipsyDharma]

Hi Andy, thanks for taking the time to respond. Noted about the video, cheers. I think I followed all best practices throughout the site to the best of my ability. I'm trying to rank the product pages for keywords like: brown leather boots, ankle boots for women, black leather boots and so on. Homepage and all the category pages I'm trying to rank for things like: leather boots, boots for women, handmade boots. For the past couple of months I've not built a single link with keyword rich anchors through.

Usually we get about 40-70K visitors to our website per month just through word of mouth and social media. As for Google, the website has never really ranked high for any keywords other than our brand name.

Please let me know if you have any further suggestions.

Cheers,

Peter

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Just as a side note, a particular pet hate of mine (and many others) is video playing with audio immediately when you visit a page. If I were in an office and this started, I would be panicking to find it and probably never return.

I can only offer the same suggestions that I do for others in the same boat as yourself here. Without working on a site and spending hours analysing it, it could be any number of factors.

With the phrases you give above as examples, are you trying to get the homepage to rank for them? Have you followed best practices throughout the site? Have you ever ranked highly for the site, or has it always been at this level?

-Andy