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Thanks Boyd for such a detailed reply. This is all very helpful information!

Thanks Boyd, below are thee clarifications:

• For the ranking drop, are you talking about the phrase "travel medical insurance"

Yes

• How many content changes did you make? From looking at the wayback machine, it appears that you added a lot of content. But the most recent date the wayback machine shows is from March 14th, 2019 so I need clarification on what changes you made in addition to changing the URL.

Significant content changes including adding clarifying topics (header and content), added images, added a FAQ section, added outbound link to authority sources.

• Did you change the title tag?

No

• Did you make a change to your navigation? The wayback version shows you had a sitewide navigation link to link in the navigation to the Travel Medical page under the "Plans" drop down but I didn't see that on the current site. Was that change just made along with the 301 redirect?

No, the main navigation change (removing the Plans dropdown) happened about 1 month ago (end of Jan)

• Did you get rid of any other internal links to this page around this time?

No

Thanks very much for whatever insight you can provide, much appreciated and let me know if you need anything else.

I was making updates to the content on the following page, and a few days later dropped from #2 SERP ranking to 50+.

Things I checked:

Yes, 301 redirect was implemented right away.

After publishing, I manually requested indexing in search console.

Right after publishing I re-submitted the  sitemap manually and Google said they had not crawled it in 9 days.

My question: should I change the URL back to the old one, or give it a little more time (especially since I re-submitted sitemap)

Original URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical/

New URL: https://www.travelinsurancereview.net/plans/travel-medical-insurance/