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Looks like were are in the same situation. I have yet to find an explanation, but if I do, I'll follow up here to keep you in the loop.

Hello,

During the site crawl in the week of Jan 29th, my site experienced a somewhat significant dip in search visibility.

While all my dashboards for the brand experienced a dip, it was most noticeable in a dashboard focused on a specific region.

Overall, I didn't make any major changed to the site, nor did the competitors I'm tracking. FWIW, the competitors I'm tracking stayed steady and didn't move up or down in visibility during my dip.

I stay fairly up-to-date with SEO best practices and I don't believe there were any algorithm changes during this time.

Now, there is one possible reasoning for this dip. Sometime before the week of Jan 29th, we began a new web promotion. To track this promotion, I added some minor JavaScript in the header. This additional JavaScript did slow the site speed slightly, but only to a rating of "Average" based on PageSpeed Insights.

Does anyone have any insights as to why my site may have suffered a dip during the week of Jan 29th?

Thanks.

Sounds like we have the same thoughts on the matter. Thanks for the response!

We recently switched to a new site and I realized that our developer changed our locations page from /locations to /location. Our developer set the redirects correctly, so we most of the "juice" should still transfer fine.

Even though most of the link strength should transfer to the new site, the language is misleading and according to MOZBar, the previously established links to /locations do not show up. The best option in my mind is to have the developer switch back to /locations and redirect /location.

Do you feel this is the best option as well and is there anything I should be cautious about when doing this?

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks for the response.

Have you personally used any of the widgets and if so, which do you recommend?

Currently, I use an embeddable Yelp review widget on my site. The widget I use has been helpful, but is no longer actively maintained and I'd prefer to show Google reviews instead.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a widget to embed Google reviews?

Thanks for the thoughts. Meta updates was my first instinct, as I have had instant success when making those changes, but there were no meta changes found. Inbound and outbound links is a definite possibility. Unfortunately, I haven't tracked their inbound/outbound links, so I wouldn't be able to compare differences.

Quality of their link profile makes a lot of sense and was something I considered. What caught me off guard is how sudden and high the spike was. Thanks for the response.

We opened a new location in a new market in early February and eventually tapered off improving SERP rankings when we reached an average rank of #3. As we began increasing in ranking, the competitions' average rankings we're declining.

Suddenly, in April, one of our competitors spiked to an average SERP ranking of #1. The site that jumped to the top of SERP was a location page and there was no content changes, or changes to their website. Our competitor's links also decreased during the time of this spike.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what caused our competitor to spike so high, so suddenly?

Thanks,