Traffic's Down? Don't Sack Your SEO Yet, FFS!

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Your traffic's down, you're about to have a furious phone call with your

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SEO, and there's a decent chance the drop has got nothing to do with them.

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20 minutes and you'll know which it is.

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This is SEO Fucking What.

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I'm Nikki, over 30 years in this game, back before it was called SEO,

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and I help small business owners make actual money from their websites.

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exists because of a conversation I have several times a year, and it usually

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starts with someone forwarding me a graph and saying, "Look at this. What

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have they done to us?" And sometimes, the answer is yes, your SEO has made

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a mess of it, and we'll get to that.

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But a lot of the time, what's happened is that traffic went down for a

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reason that has nothing to do with anybody's SEO work and somebody is

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about to get sacked over nothing.

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So today, I'm going to show you how to work out which one you're looking at.

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This is the episode I want you to bookmark and come back to the next time you open

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your analytics and have a panic attack.

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Before the diagnosis, let's do the maths, and it's not complicated

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maths, which is exactly why nobody ever bothers to explain it to you.

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Your search traffic is basically three things multiplied together.

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How many people are searching for your stuff, where you show up when they do,

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and whether they click on you rather than something else on the page.

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Change any one of those and your traffic changes.

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Only one of them is what most people mean by SEO.

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Traffic is like your shop on the high street.

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If fewer people came in this month, that could be because your window display is

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worse, or because the council closed the road, or the big employer up the way laid

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off 200 people. Or it's the last week of January and nobody's got any money.

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Same shop, same window, fewer customers.

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So here are four things that could have happened to your shop

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window, and how to tell them apart.

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One, fewer people are searching.

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This is the most common cause of a drop, and the least discussed because there's

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nothing to sell you on the back of it.

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Demand moves.

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It's seasonal for most B2B services, even when you don't think it is, and

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often more brutally than people expect.

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August is dead in loads of sectors because your buyers are

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in Cornwall with their kids.

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Mid-December to early January, usually pretty shit if you're not

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selling anything for Christmas.

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If your clients are in education, your year runs to a completely

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different rhythm to everyone else's.

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And sometimes demand just changes.

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A regulation deadline passes and the panic searching stops.

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A funding scheme closes.

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A topic that was in every trade publication last

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year might be old news now.

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If your traffic was inflated by a moment, it comes back down when the

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moment ends and nothing has gone wrong.

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The tell for this is that your position held steady, but your impressions fell.

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You're still showing up in the same place, but there are fewer

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searches happening. Number two, the page you're on changed shape.

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You can hold your position exactly and still lose clicks because position

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three isn't where it was five years ago.

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Above you now, there might be an AI summary, four ads, a map pack, a block

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of related questions, a video carousel.

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You haven't moved.

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The page moved.

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Everything organic got pushed further down, and a chunk of people got their

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answer before they even scrolled to you.

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The tell for this is that your position is flat, your impressions

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are flat, but your clicks are down.

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Nothing about your site changed, and the amount of stuff sat

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between the searcher and your link is the thing that has changed.

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And I'll be straight with you, this one is real, and it's getting worse,

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especially for informational searches.

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It's much less of a problem for the searches where someone actually

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wants to hire somebody because a summary can't do the job for them,

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and that's worth remembering next time someone tells you search is dead.

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Number three, maybe your rankings actually dropped.

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And this is the one that's genuinely an SEO issue, and it's a much smaller

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share of drops than people assume.

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It happens.

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Google runs updates.

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A competitor gets their act together.

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Somebody breaks something on your website during a redesign.

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A page gets de-indexed.

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You move the URL without a redirect.

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And you can tell this because your position on your money

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queries get measurably worse.

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Not your site average, which I'll come back to, but the specific

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queries that matter to you.

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And number four, nothing happened, and your measurement's broken.

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This happens more than anyone ever admits, and it's the most

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embarrassing meeting to be in.

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The tracking code came off during a site update.

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Someone installed a cookie banner, and now a big chunk of visitors

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aren't being recorded at all.

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Two properties are running, and you're reading the wrong one.

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A filter got added.

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The site moved, and nobody reconnected anything.

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And you can tell this because the drop happens on one specific day.

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It's a cliff edge rather than a slope, and it lines up suspiciously well with

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something being done to the website.

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So, four possible causes, and only one of them is your SEO's problem.

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After the break, I'll give you the 20-minute check that tells you

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which one you're dealing with, in the right order, before you make a phone call

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or send an email you can't take back.

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Right, your 20-minute diagnosis.

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You're gonna need Search Console.

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Google Search Console we set up back in episode 19.

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So if you skipped that one, go and do it now and come back next

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week when you've got some data.

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Work through it in this order, because the order saves you time.

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First of all, compare this month against the same period last

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year, not the previous month.

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This is the single most useful thing in this whole episode.

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Comparing October to September tells you nothing because September and October are

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different months with different demand.

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Compare October to October.

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Search Console holds 16 months, so you can just about do a year-on-year comparison.

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And if you want to keep more than that, you need to export it somewhere.

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If your drop disappears when you compare year-on-year, congratulations.

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It's seasonal.

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There's nothing to fix.

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Secondly, look at clicks, impressions, and position as three separate numbers.

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Do not look at the one big line.

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Impressions down with position flat means fewer searchers.

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Impressions flat and clicks down means the page changed shape around you.

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Position down means you've got a ranking problem.

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This one step sorts most cases.

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Buh, buh.

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Thirdly, ignore average position.

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Trust me, it's an average across every query your site appears for,

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so it moves when you start appearing for new rubbish that you don't care

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about, and it can improve while your important rankings get worse.

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Filter down to individual queries, or it's a number that tells you nothing.

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Fourthly, find out whether the loss is concentrated or spread.

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Look at the Queries tab and the Pages tab.

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Is the drop coming from two or three queries on one page, or is it a

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little bit of everything everywhere?

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Because concentrated means a page problem, and it's usually fixable in an afternoon.

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Spread across everything means either the site or an update,

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and it's a bigger conversation.

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Then, this is number five, look at the shape of the drop.

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Open the graph and look at what happened.

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A cliff on one specific day is usually a technical event, something

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you did or a manual action.

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Check the Manual Actions report while you're in there.

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It takes 10 seconds.

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A gradual slope over months is competition or fading demand,

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and no single event caused it.

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And lastly, check whether it happened to everybody.

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Google publishes when it's rolling out updates on its Search Status

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Dashboard, so you can see whether your drop lines up with a confirmed update.

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If the whole sector wobbled in the same week, you've got context.

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It doesn't get anyone off the hook for what happens next. And the caveat,

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because I'm not here to hand out excuses: sometimes the answer is that your SEO

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has done nothing for eight months, and your rankings have slid because of it.

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The process will show you that too, and it'll show you clearly, with

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dates, and then you've got a proper conversation to have, backed up with

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something better than a feeling.

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So your job this week is to write one sentence.

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Go through those six steps and fill in the blanks.

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"We lost this many clicks from these queries on these pages, starting on

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roughly this date, and our position on those queries went from here to here."

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That's it.

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One sentence.

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Because if you can write that sentence, you've probably done more diagnostic work

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than most agencies are going to do before sending you a report full of graphs,

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and you walk into every conversation about it knowing more than the person

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who's meant to be explaining it to you.

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And if you can't fill in a bit of it, well, that's fine.

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That gap is your actual question, and it's a much better question than "Why

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is our traffic down?" If you can ask how many clicks did we lose, what queries

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were those clicks on, which pages were those on, when did it roughly start,

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where did our queries go from and to?

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That's a whole better conversation than "Why is our traffic down?"

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The reason I care about this one is that I've seen good people get sacked

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over some August stats, and I've watched useless ones keep a retainer

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for a year because their client had no way of telling the difference.

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20 minutes in Search Console and you can tell the difference between a

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seasonal dip and a drop in rankings.

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If this was useful, follow SEO Fucking What in whichever app you're

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in right now so you get the next one, and send it to someone who's

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currently panicking at a graph.

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My On-Page SEO Toolkit is now free.

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So go and get it at nonwankyseo.com.

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Until next time, get found, make money, and check the calendar

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before you check the algorithm.