I suspect that your site was affected by Google's "thin content" update. Spam sites auto-build thousands of pages in a short time, using only a paragraph for each, so Google will rank a site for its "footprint" or number of pages. By the time Google catches up to it, that site's got a new domain and it's selling backlinks in double fistfuls. Google stopped ranking pages and sites with that thin content on them.
Pages like this one saw their rankings plummet.
The site is missing out on a lot of search traffic related to "ski clothing and equipment"
Many Page Titles and Page Descriptions ("Page Titles" for short) in Google search results are defaulting to the first text Google finds on a page. Some default to text. Others, to menu items or random text that would confuse a user.
Page Titles are top SEO markers of a site and every page on it.
Google can "read" as we understand it. It doesn't just count keywords like many SEO plugins and apps do. It looks for how each page is related to every other page, via text and hyperlinks. Google looks for SEO written by a person, not AI.
Google likes sites with keywords in actual searches like "womens snow jacket red" or "snow jackets near me." Google likes text organized in optimized sentences (because that's how human beings read).
Without that Page Title, Google doesn't know what the site wants to rank for. It's guessing. Google doesn't like to guess.
About 30% of the site's traffic comes from searches for the business by name. Only 70% of the site's traffic is true “search” or “unexpected” traffic.
The site has nearly 9,000 referring domains for backlinks and all but a handful are worthless.
A site's "A Score" is its "domain authority" from 1 to 100. It answers the questions "Is this a legit site?" and "Does this site have any traffic?"
In my experience, any site scoring below 50 is trash, and many above that are irrelevant. Only 40 of these 9,000 domains score above 50. Of those, many have disappeared.
The first few sites on this list are search engines and general interest like Buzzfeed, Pinterest, and Substack. Then sites in different countries: Bangladesh, Japan, Colombia, France, Brazil, Sweden, The Netherlands. Their domains don't suggest any relevance to ski clothing or equipment.
What is the real dollar value of a backlink from aftership.com or shmoop.com?
Part 1: Keyword Audit Let's discuss the scope of the project. You want more than traffic. You want customers. That's a deep dive into your G4 Analytics and Google Search Console.
Keywords you're ranking for are a good start. I'd follow up with your best sellers and busiest pages, along with high-volume variations and branded keywords like "helly hansen ski pants."
Part 2: Page Titles The most important item for SEO is changing blank Page Titles. Each Page Title of the site needs to tell Google 1) what it is and 2) how it relates to the rest of the site and 3) how all of it relates to what potential customers are searching for.
Rewriting Page Titles gives Google the opportunity to rank the site "as is." Because the tabs in the file cabinet are blank, Google isn't ranking the site properly. You want to fill in those blanks before zeroing in on page text to boost more specific keywords like "hh black ski pants women stretch."
In my experience, without exception, rewriting Page Titles for a significant number of pages delivers a tremendous impact right away. The more we change, the bigger the impact.
Part 3: Page Text Increase the amount of optimized text on the site. Many pages are one paragraph. I'd want to increase text on pages, as well as keywords linked to internal pages. Hyperlinked text shows Google how every page on the site is relevant to every other.