What am I doing wrong here??

[FPForum]

I could really use some help, advice or recommendations on how to get back some of my Google rankings.

One of my sites (AmazingLoveQuotes.org) has been established for several years now and I used to have a few pages that did pretty well in Google search. One or two in particular ranked for several different keyphrases and would drive in several hundred hits a day. However, over the past year or so things have gradually declined. At first (sometime around mid-year last year I would say) I thought maybe some of my pages were just sandboxed or Google was going through an update and things would come back up. After a couple of months I decided some changes needed to be done because things weren't improving. I started working on improving my "Experience" in Google Search Console. I changed my theme to an AMP theme and got that all setup, then I utilized Hummingbird to get my Page Experience and Core Web Vitals up as well. As you can see from the screenshot below, those are all green and look to be okay..

Considering those were red before, I thought maybe this would do the trick, but I still wasn't seeing improvement. Keep in mind, I've continuously built backlinks to my site ever since I launched it several years ago. So, from before my rankings dropped all the way until today, I've steadily bought/built different incoming links to my site. You can see that my Majestic rating isn't the best (Trust Flow: 23 and Citation Flow: 35), but both of my scores have at least increased over the years. In fact, both were lower last year when I was ranking for lots of different keyphrases.

Now here I am today, with my rankings still continuing to go downward. Out of frustration and feeling like I don't even know what to do anymore, it's caused me to create less content this year and build fewer links. At this point in time my backlink count has started to drop some because I haven't been building new ones, but I feel like that couldn't be the issue here as this was happening while I was still building more incoming links. Just look at this screenshot from Ahrefs:

LAST 30 DAYS:

LAST 12 MONTHS:

Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this or how I can determine what has caused this? It seems like everything I look at has actually improved over the past year (my Vitals...my Majestic scores..more Content..etc) but Google has been pushing my site the other direction. Any advice or suggestions would be great because frankly, I'm not really sure what else to try at this point...

 

[Rob Whisonant]

Have you analyzed the listings that rank above you now?

 

[RenderedElite]

The problem isn't your SEO efforts, DA rating, or any of that. The problem is competitors have created content that rose above yours. Update the pages you once ranked better for, and give Google a reason to prioritize your content over others.

I have a ton of new websites I started this year, and I was able to quickly take top spots in Google for my keywords by optimizing right, posting frequently, and out-doing my competitors.

Sometimes, I can just add some images with optimized alt tags, throw in some optimized FAQ, and provide my readers with more information on the topic. Actually, that's most of the time. Backlinks are great, but they are not my priority. Most of my focus is on content and social media.