Ranking Went Down - Troubleshoot?

[CashCowAdv]

I have a local business in a very specific niche.

Keywords that I have targeted closely match search intent.

For the past 2 years, I've been dominating at #1.

Few days ago, my website took a -25% hit on SERP visibility. After digging in, I found that someone sent ghost traffic 400% the normal amount I usually get a day or two after my rankings started to slip. (They only sent ghost traffic for 1 day)

I used GA to to dig in and saw that traffic via organic went up. The keywords they used was
ga bot tinyurl.com/en2xa8dk

tinyurl.com/en2xa8dk redirects to a 'buy website traffic website.'

Bounce rate is low at 8% but retention time is low at :28s. I checked for spam links and didn't find any via GSC and Ahrefs.

Appreciate any suggestions to recover and combat this.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@CashCowAdv, It's hard to say what hit you. It could have been the tremors leading up to the March 10th / 11th update which included a big local update.

I don't think the ghost traffic matters. Those don't actually hit your site as visitors. They just "ping" random Google Analytics ID's to mess up your data so you notice and then see their stupid "buy bot traffic" sales pitch. I guess enough idiots turn around and buy it that they keep doing it.