A bit nervous that I messed up. Did I?

[imdrew12]

I am brand new to SEO, only started two months ago and I am concerned that I may have done something I shouldn't have or did'nt do something i should have. 2 months ago started working on a new employers Shopify website which had no prior SEO done to it. 6 weeks ago I switched to a new theme and started technical SEO. I renamed every 500+ pictures with SEO friendly names, filled out every alt tag, started the blog back up, made sure all header, title, meta description were filled out and SEO friendly, submitted site map to search engines, and more that I cant think of right now. I have read many SEO checklists online and followed them all. Also improvements in Site speed and functionality, along with corrected shipping prices and products weights have been made. Basically the site is about 85% brand new. We also bought a shortened version of our website name and put a 301 redirect to the new domain.

Basically my question is this. In the last couple of weeks traffic and sales have dropped, and we no longer show up on image searches for certain keywords. Is this because the content we used to rank for has changed and it takes a while for the search engines to rank that change?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

edit: if any one is interested or wants to critique our website

[cmorales]

I saw the problem of your website. Your sitemap.xml is not optimized.

To explain the importance of sitemap.xml, it is the entire structure of your website that gives guide to search engine bots to crawl the pages.

Without sitemap.xml, your website will be unable to crawl and indexed.

Please check this your sitemap -> https://squishyfaces.com/sitemap.xml

Your technical SEO is perfect optimization but do not forget to optimize the sitemap.xml. Put the list of page you want to crawl by search engine robots in sitemap.xml.

[imdrew12]

How do I optimize my sitemap? I am using the one generated by Shopify.

[Rockpapercopy]

Hi imdrew, I don't think you can - or there's any point to it - optimize sitemap. The one generated by shopify is good as gold 🙂

[Rockpapercopy]

Hi - basically yes; each time you work on your website [and you have done a significant amount of work] your rank will drop temporarily. It will bounce back on its own after few weeks - and then will start improving following the optimization, so it's just part of the process. Give your website a rest for few weeks and work on off-page SEO if it's part of the project.

[HelenHel]

I agree with the answer that you should think also about off-page SEO (blogging,Q&A etc),cause SEO it's like a huge puzzle, make pieces of it step by step and in the end you will see the result!