We just recently moved to another city

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Gaurav Singh: Ethan Benge While changing the suburbs, did you change the location on the keywords?
  
  16h
• 
  Ethan Benge: Gaurav Singh no, most of the keywords on the site still have city a rather then city b. The orginal city is the bigger main city though while the one we moved to is a suburb
  
  9h
• 
  Martin Begley: Here`s the thing, while I am sorry to see your site dropping off but the fact of the matter is while everybody is focusing on keywords and backlinks, people are forgetting Google`s update from 2 years ago and brought into effect last year and that is the update called Core Web Vitals. This simply means your site needs to load faster and give a better UX and yes it is a ranking factor regardless of what others say plus With Google having now fully switched over to Mobile-First indexing, your website MUST be Mobile-First in order to be indexed properly and therefore ranked. Mobile-First is not a trend of the future, it`s already here and it`s not going anywhere.
  
  15h
• 
  Ethan Benge: Martin Begley I totally get that. We are mobile friendly though
  
  9h
• 
  Martin Begley: There is a big difference in mobile friendly and mobile first. While Mobile-Friendly is making a desktop site presentable on mobile devices = Desktop REDUCED to Mobile. Mobile-First puts the emphasis on the mobile version of the site before the desktop = Mobile EXPANDS to Desktop
  
  1h
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: Group expertIs your service area defined in your GMB listing? That`s really the big first step if you are an out-call (i.e. you go to them to do the service). So long as your old town is still in your defined service area - your organic listings should remain similar... though the map pack may feel a bit of an effect because that really is all about location.
  
  13h
• 
  Ethan Benge: Stockbridge Truslow the service area shows all of the surrounding areas. Both city a and city b. The pack acutally wasn`t all that affected. We still showing up in the pack. It`s just the keywords that really tanked
  
  9h
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: Group expertIt`s hard to say without doing a real analysis, but I suspect it has little to do with the move.
  
  I haven`t seen your site so I don`t know if this is exactly right, but it`s something I`ve seen quite a bit in these types of businesses....
  
  The core updates of late usually have a LOT to do with Google refining and updating it`s understanding of search intent. So, for terms that weren`t really covered by this - matching keywords was still a good way to rank. As the knowledge graph grows and RankBrain (and all those other front end processing things) start to learn more - matching keywords just stops working.
  
  What I`m commonly seeing is sites that are, let`s say a Plumber, finding that there is lots of search volume for "how to unclog a drain." So they create an article optimized for those keywords, but ultimately the article doesn`t actually explain how to unclog a drain - it ends up just telling you what a drain clog is and that the answer is to call a plumber. That type of thing works great for searches with a transactional intent, but if Google starts to see it as an informational intent and you`re not presenting the answer so much as selling your transaction - it`s just suddenly going to tank.
  
  So... the first thing I`d be doing is looking at the keywords you`re losing traction on and think about what the person who types that in is REALLY looking to find. (HINT: They are not merely hoping to find their search term repeated 10 times on the page). Then consider whether or not the page designed to rank for that ACTUALLY delivers what the person is looking for or not.
  
  It`s also helpful to check the SERPs for those terms and look at the TYPES of pages (not the pages themselves, but what the pages actually do) that are showing up in the SERPs. (It also helps a lot if you have done this all along and know what they look like this week compared to last week and backwards through time. It`s easier to spot "what exactly changed" if you know what was there before).
  
  As I mentioned - this very well might not really apply to you at all. But in cases I`ve seen in recent months describing similar things - something like this example is happening about 70% of the time - making it worth being the first thing to consider and really take a look at.
  
  8h
• 
  Tim Capper: Group expertWhat did you change on your business profile ?
  
  Organically, you moving your business to another location should not affect how your sites pages appear in SERPS - unless you changed something also on site.
  
  This update has not finished yet - don`t make any panic changes
  
  11h
• 
  Ethan Benge: Tim Capper we changed the address from city a to city b. The service areas remain the same though. The city though has quite a bit of language throughout it that have city a in it.
  
  9h