@ichthyous
We await your response with bated breath...
The easy answer would be to say nothing and to let people try and figure it out for themselves however IMHO it is very important for newbies especially to understand the importance of examining competitors' websites and long-termism.
Firstly, just to give you an idea of this year's improvement for my own B2B sites:
Site 1 traffic July v June +29.4%, July v January +62.8%
Site 2 traffic July v June +14.5%, July v January +118.9%
When I make alterations / improvements / modifications / etc I very rarely do them on the spur of the moment, I usually think about it for weeks and months and evaluate what I'm going to do since I know what I do will have a substantial impact therefore I need to know I'm as possibly correct as I can be.
I already knew the sites were good, both have completely different but great template designs yet there had to be a "reason" why I was being outranked and especially so when my competitors' sites were not as good, in many different people's opinions, nor provided as good information.
Having reviewed their sites over several years and watched their performances, what did they have that mine did not? Why did I rank easily for less popular keyword widgets but only for some of the more popular ones?
1. Was there anything they were doing that I didn't such as social?
I used to do social however it was a waste of time with very little interaction and in B2B especially it doesn't seem to be something trade BUYERS want to discuss, basically they're playing their cards close to their chest. I used to be a very large wholesale buyer therefore I understood this.
2. What did they have in their source code that I didn't?
Quite simply all of them were running squeaky-clean sites:-) However I've never seen so much code-bloat and especially amongst those using WP. Nothing secretive was going on.
3. What did they show on-page that I didn't?
Quite simply, here were my answers, two of them:
1. Some descriptive product text on each page that I never included simply because each specifier / buyer would already know this therefore for 27 years have NEVER, ever found it necessary to include!
2. All of them were displaying more, mostly good, product images than me ... all of them.
So I took one specific page late last summer, August / September, and modified it to incorporate the additional text and a couple of new and unique images. By earl October I had my answer, this worked and I saw this page go from the mid 20s through the teens and is now #1.
Therefore in October I started to modify every page on both sites, Site 1 was done first and its traffic improved by 42.3% between August and December 2019. Site 2 I started in November / December and January 2020 was when the mods came to be noticed when an 11.25% increase was recorded and since then it has more than doubled.
No magic bullets, no luck involved, simply hard work and experience plus the willingness to accept that I was not doing something my competitors were.
The 3 month update I referred to was for a UK specialist B2C widget site I went through during the early days of lockdown and made some subtle however very significant improvements, compared to January 2020 it is +22.9% and July 2019 +74.1%.
Guess what?
I'm considering melding these two sites:-)))
Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2020
