u/Exact-Delay2152

I recently cleaned up a site that had a bunch of articles targeting basically the same thing with slightly different keywords.

Stuff like:

• best CRM for small business
• top CRM tools
• CRM software for startups
• cheap CRM for teams

Different keywords, but when I checked the SERPs, Google was showing almost the same results for all of them. Originally the plan was to keep publishing more content, but instead I tried consolidating everything into keyword clusters.
Ended up merging 43 weaker posts into 8 larger pages, cleaned up the internal linking, and redirected the overlapping stuff.

Honestly wasn’t expecting much, but after about 5–6 weeks:

• rankings became way less volatile
• a few terms moved from page 2 into top 5
• clicks went up even though impressions dipped a little

The part that surprised me most was that some smaller long-tail keywords actually started ranking better even though they weren’t in exact-match headings anymore.
Feels like Google cares more about overall topical relevance + matching intent than forcing every keyword into its own page now.

wanted to know how other people are handling this lately. Are you still making separate pages for close keyword variations, or are you consolidating them into bigger topic pages now?

So we took a pretty solid hit a few weeks back. A handful of pages that were sitting comfortably in the top 5 dropped to page 2 or 3 overnight. No manual action, nothing in GSC flagged. Just.. gone.

I've been going back and forth trying to diagnose what actually happened, and honestly it's maddening because there are too many variables at once. Like is it the content itself that's thin or outdated? Is it that we lost some referring domains recently and the link profile weakened? Or is it purely a search intent thing where Google re-evaluated what searchers actually want and we just don't fit that anymore?

The thing that's tripping me up is that these three causes require completely different fixes. If it's intent, rewriting the whole page around new SERPs. If it's links, that's an outreach problem. If it's content quality, it's a different kind of editorial audit. And doing all three at once without knowing which one is the actual culprit feels like a waste of time and budget.

What's your actual diagnostic process when this happens? Do you start by pulling the SERP and checking what's ranking now vs. before? Run a content gap analysis? Look at link velocity changes? Something else?

wanted to know what's worked for people especially for pages that don't have an obvious smoking gun when you look at them.

After working on a few Elementor sites lately, I honestly think people blame Elementor for problems that are sometimes just bad hosting or too many plugins. The biggest issues I kept finding were massive addon packs, too many animations, and pages built with deeply nested containers for simple layouts. One site had 4 Elementor addon plugins installed just for a handful of widgets and removing them helped more than most “speed optimization” tricks.

What surprised me is a lot of the usual advice barely changed anything. Chasing perfect PageSpeed scores, disabling random WP features, or stacking multiple optimization plugins mostly felt pointless. The biggest improvements came from simplifying layouts, reducing plugin bloat, compressing images properly, and fixing server issues first.

wanted to know what others here usually find is the real bottleneck on slow Elementor sites?

I’ve been trying to figure out why some of my pages aren’t ranking as expected even after doing proper keyword targeting, content optimization, and building backlinks. In some cases, competitors with fewer backlinks are still ranking more consistently.

When I look closer, the main difference seems to be brand presence. Those sites are getting mentioned across different platforms, in discussions, and generally seem more visible online. So now I’m wondering if SEO is shifting more toward brand awareness and trust rather than just backlinks and on-page work.

Is anyone else seeing this in their results, or is there something I might be missing here?