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After months of rapid keyword and traffic growth, keywords now plummeting (on SEMrush). Clicks returning to levels from 3 months ago. Normal behaviour or cause for concern?

Hi all, relative newcomer to the SEO space, so forgive me for the noobish question.

I've been in my role for about 10 months working with a reputable B2C company on their SEO. In 10 months, traffic has grown by 25% and keywords had also increased dramatically, with a doubling of keywords in the top 3 positions (according to SEMrush). However, from about mid-March I've seen a steady decline in keyword rankings, to the point where we're now ranking for fewer than we were a year ago. We still have more in the top 3 (double the amount) than we did a year ago, but I have seen a softening in impressions and clicks on GSC over the last month or so compared to previous months, too. We're still up YoY, but not as much as we had been around late April/mid-May.

My initial research points to this being a consolidation of our organic performance into higher-performing keywords that may be more relevant to user intent, but the drop in clicks has me slightly concerned on that front.

Matters are made slightly more challenging by the fact that we're doing a phased migration to a new website (not my decision to do it in stages and I argued strongly against it). We've got cross-domain canonicals set up and had to consolidate duplicated category and product pages into one with canonicals and redirects. I've spent a lot of time cleaning up a mess since I started, long story short. Unsure if these changes, or the May core update have had an impact, or we were tested ranking for more keywords, Google didn't like the results and so is reigning in our SERP visibility?

Thoughts and advice appreciated. I'm very hamstrung by what I can do on a technical level at the moment as dev resources are tied up in getting the new site ready to launch but if I can at least stop things from getting worse or improve them, it'd ease the stress.

submitted by /u/CrispyLeeks
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