Hey John, thanks so much for your feedback. Spent a few days looking at everything through those lenses and have narrowed it down to a few things. I've explained my reasoning below in case it helps others in the group: 1) Pagespeed seems to have dropped dramatically which may be impacting engagement and be a factor in the drop in inquiries. I've asked the client for access to their caching plugin as it's managed automatically by their host so I can't access it right now. I know pagespeed isn't THE ranking factor, but it is A ranking factor, right? 2) Traffic to their core 2 service pages has dropped, but it's gone up on other service pages, so traffic actually increased slightly overall (comparing the last quarter with the previous one). Bounce rate is pretty low (lower than 25% on most service pages, which I think is pretty good?), so people are sticking around on the pages. I'm guessing the copy needs to be stronger to get people to submit inquiries, or it's the drop in traffic because of the ranking volatility that's contributing to fewer inquiries. 3) We recently went over all the blog content we did for them in the past year and restructured it into silos with pillar pages and supporting articles. We did this on ~50 blog pages, starting in January and finishing mid-Feb, so maybe that's the cause of the volatility? Google might be taking a minute to work out the changes as it reindexes the new links? 4) Client hasn't given us budget to do backlinks and wanted to 'do the free stuff' (what doesn't cost them any more money than they're currently paying) first, so they've been gradually losing links but we haven't had budget to acquire new ones. We're in discussion with them about this again. 5) This is a client that's always been hyper-focused on rankings due to their past experience with agencies. They're actually tracking rankings themselves I think. I've been trying to change the conversation to be revenue-focused for over a year but every strategy call they don't have the data on how many new clients they got. We've floated the idea of getting access to their CRM, but because of HIPAA compliance they're not comfortable with that. Frustrating, as even by VERY conservative estimates they should have seen a 2.5X ROI over the past year, and more likely in the region of 24X assuming a 25% close rate... But since the last 3 months have been slower when they should have been the busiest part of the year, they're stressing.

@John Romaine Thanks - we didn't change the URLs, just the internal linking structure. They had enough budget for everything other than backlinks, and off-page wasn't a priority this time last year as their whole site was a mess, no content etc. So we were happy to take them on to improve all that, and come back to the discussion of backlinks later. Overall they have been good to work with!