Loosing business to your competitors is frustrating at best and dam right dangerous to your survival at worst. Employing black hat techniques can often backfire as quickly as they yield initial results but employing rogue traders (site designers that lack a SEO understanding) is probably the quickest way to the doldrums for any company that relies on natural search engine results for its business.
If you have lost traffic over a short period of time after enjoying good positions and traffic for a sustained period, then it's likely you have falling out of favor with the search engines for some reason or another and something is wrong. However this is not to be confused with the natural ebbs and flows that take place during a major update, as is often the case when a newly gained position will drop out of the SERPs temporarily but these normally recover after the update has completed.
We reccommend an Emergancy Site Analysis in these former of these cases:
Costs for an Emergency Site Analysis
Emergency Site Analysis = £350 GBP:
What you will learn
You will learn about your mistakes, you will learn about your weaknesses, you will learn where your holes are, and how many holes you have in your ship. We will give you recommendations for necessary repairs and a timeline as to how quickly these positions can be regained. Also we will teach you techniques that will hopefully allow you to sidestep these issues and regain those important positions as quickly as possible.