Static content pages ranking dropping all the time

[haapalatuomas]

Hello all. I have been working three months in my current job in the hotel industry. I have been publishing a lot of content to our website (mainly articles), which in general have been ranking well and really boosted our website traffic.

The problem that I am facing, though, is the fact that our static pages' rankings are basically constantly dropping. Especially one of our main pages, which is this hotel page. I haven't been doing any real changes to the content, but the ranking (with keywords "hotelli helsinki" [Hotel in Helsinki in Finnish]) has plummeted from 13th position all the way down to 19th...

What has been happening during these last three months is that we did change to a new domain and we have done all the redirections and also informed Google about this change through search console. I have also done some minor changes to the on-page content, such as changing the meta titles and descriptions as well as the page title and some of the text content to more natural ones instead of clumsy SEO texts and optimizing the images. This hasn't helped at all though and the rankings seem to steadily drop all the time.

What would YOU do with this page? Maybe add more text content to the page to be more informative? All tips would be highly appreciated.

[Victormisa]

@tom-capper Nice!

[haapalatuomas]

@tom-capper thank you Tom. When I look at the first page of Google with this search query, information sites and comparison sites (such as Booking.com) tend to do well. But what also has happened is that some individual hotels have passed us in the rankings.

I did some minor changes to our on-page content last week, which saw us climbing to 15th position again with this query. Also on other website someone gave me a tip about user experience and he mentioned that for example the H1 title is too far down in the page and that there are multiple blocks on the page, before the actual text content starts...

These are of course things that I need to talk about with our coders and see if we can find a solution.

One other thing mentioned is the website speed, which seems bad, but in Google Search Console's page experience report, we are getting 90% acceptance for mobile and 76% for desktop, so this should not be an issue in Google's eyes...

[Tom.Capper]

@haapalatuomas

Although some of the changes you mention (especially the domain shift) can commonly result in ranking changes, it's important to remember that changes in your ranking are not necessarily the result of things that happened on your own site.

Changes to Google's algorithm, or to competitor sites, are at least as likely to be responsible.

What are the sites that have overtaken you in the last few months? Are they a similar intent (i.e. individual hotels vs. comparison sites vs. information sites)? Are they better known? Similar page content? Higher Page Authority? etc. etc.

The explanations often lie in the answers to questions like these.