What could be the causes for losing 2/3 of the kws?

[jediviper]

Some of our entities got affected by the May update and while I can understand that our drop in rankings has affected the traffic around 20%, what really concerns me is the drop in the number of kws for a specific domain.

According to Ahrefs, at the beginning of May there were more than 7.000kws ranking for many different countries and during the last weeks this number is around 2.500kws.
The drop is huge for all main countries, so it's not like some countries are doing better than others.

Semrush is reporting similar results, so it doesn't look like a glitch of Ahrefs.
What could cause such a huge damage? The website hasn't been involved in any PBN's, big content or link building changes in the last years.

[tangor]

Cause? g is, perhaps, refining their keyword sensitivity across the board?

Who knows?

It does remain, however, a rare entertainment for the webmaster who seeks the keyword chase! :)

Secondary reality is g is fine-tuning their expense (payouts) to maximize profits ... and there ain't a lot you (or me) can do about it.

</commonsense>

[jediviper]

So what do u suggest?
Doing nothing and wait and see?
The content of our main pages is 3-12 months old, depending on the page. And all of them are affected. Should we try to rewrite all of them, so that Google gets the signal that we are refreshing the site or it won't help?

In general and after this latest Update, I have no clue where should we focus to improve our rankings. Is it content, links or something else that Google is after lately?

[n0tSEO]

The first idea that comes to mind is a mismatch between search intent and the keyword you have optimized for.

I would look into that and see if there have been problems in that area.

However, I would wait to start a massive content update to try to fix it. I'd wait another week or two to see if this is only temporary or tending to the permanent.

[NickMNS]

GIGO
First the concept of "keyword" is dead. The one to one relationship between keyword and SERP that held 10 years ago, no longer holds, it is now one to many. Furthermore it is impossible for you or anyone else to predict the many. As such third party keyword tracking tools have no way of accurately tracking anything. Add to the mix sparse data as result of the last update and voila! Garbage In == Garbage Out.

It is ridiculous that people still rely on these tools, and it is pure lunacy that people pay for them. At this point you would be better off asking your local tarot card reader what your rankings are in Google.

[jediviper]

I think that the whole problem is the E-A-T factor.
We miss a Contact Us page, CS number, address etc. Also all of our content is written by our content writers, but there is no info about the date of the article or who wrote each article.

And probably this came back to bite us in the ass, as for all the previous years the traffic and no of kws was slowly growing till the 5th of May, where the Organic Impressions and Clicks had a big drop.
Our Clicks had much smaller drop than the Impressions, so in general the CTR has dramatically improved.