Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am working on fixing accessibility issues on client's site, and they have contracted with a vendor who provides both tools to monitor the site and consulting to help us fix issues that are found.

When there are spatial relationships between elements on a page that would be not be evident to someone listening via a screen reader, a strategy that they recommended to us to is to add text helpers that are not visible, but still read by the screen readers.

An example:

Directions to our Fifth Avenue Store

I have seen this technique used on a major brand site but I am concerned that their brand strength insulates them from a hidden text penalty far more than my client's brand would. Also, their implementation uses class names like "ada_hidden" which may help search engines understand the intent, or may not at all.

I am looking for opinions regarding the use of this technique. Normally I wouldn't use it for risk of penalty, but here the intent is to improve the user experience of the pages.

Anyone used similar techniques for ADA/WCAG, or solved the problem in a more SEO-friendly way?

Thanks,

Will

We have WMT data monthly, and are setting up a Moz campaign for the site so that we'll have weekly de-personalized data moving forward.  Will also take a look at the SEMrush data.  Thanks for the suggestions.

For that time period we don't have a second source of rankings data.  Should there be reason to believe that the Webmaster Tools ranking data is not accurate?

I am investigating a two-month 25% drop in organic traffic from Google to a client's site.  When I turned to the Webmaster Tools data for the site, there is a clear, gradual drop over the course of a couple months both in impressions and clicks.  In general, the drop occurred across many pages and for a large number of queries; there wasn't a core group of keywords or pages that saw the drop...it was more sitewide.  Yet, the average rankings reported by WMT were, for the top 100 or so landing pages, not significantly different.

The site hosts information about medical conditions, and I wouldn't expect any time-related variations in search volume, and this was confirmed by looking at Google Trends data for a number of the top keywords.  I started to look at the data by query for all the top keywords (all ranked in the top 10), and saw the following general trend:  impressions were down, rankings stayed in the top 10, and Google Trends showed either flat or rising volumes.

So I am trying to make sense of that.  If the search volume trend did not decline and rankings held inside the top 10, then how could the number of impressions drop significantly?  Am I trusting the WMT data too much?  But the reality is that the volume of traffic measured by Google Analytics from Google organic did indeed drop the way Webmaster Tools show it.