How to Analyze SEO Ranking Fluctuations

Are you losing your SEO battle without even realizing it? Discover why SEO is not a 'set it and forget it' strategy. Many companies think SEO is a one-time deal - achieve your rankings, and you're done. This is less the case nowadays, as organic content competition intensifies across almost all industries. Content decay is a very real thing. If ignored, you could gradually lose your hard-earned keywords. Good news is you don't need fancy paid tools to understand content decay. Here is how to understand and fix content decay using GSC: 1) In GSC's performance overview, pinpoint the page(s) you want to analyze - the ones you notice a drop in rankings or traffic. 2) Select 'Queries' to view all keywords for that specific page. There are 2 main reasons for content decay. The first one is competitors having better content for your primary target keywords. → These are keywords that are probably still on the first page, but not on the first 3 spots,  → These keywords have a good CTR - meaning users think your content (title tag) is relevant. To improve ranking for these keywords: ↳ Check to see if it’s a content issue or link issue. ↳ Optimize your content ↳ Acquire more backlinks or both. The second reason is a mismatched search intent between your content and the keywords. → Those keywords usually have low CTR - meaning users don’t think your content is relevant. → Those keywords are opportunities for you to capture them elsewhere. To improve ranking for those keywords: ↳ Check to see if it’s a content or format issue.  ↳ Create a new page/post to rank for those keywords. ↳ Forcing irrelevant keywords into your existing content can do more harm than good. The more competitive your industry is, the more frequently you need to audit for content decay issues.

New SEO article: How to diagnose an organic traffic drop. This 8-step process shows you how to analyze your site content, links, technical SEO + more: This was a great article on the Ahrefs blog by Despina Gavoyannis. In this article she creates a step-by-step SOP that guides you through how to analyze a sudden decline in organic traffic. She provides eight different steps that site owners can walk through when analyzing a website traffic drop: 1. Verify The Traffic Drop: Use different tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Google Analytics & Search Console to verify that the drop is actually occurring. Sometimes it can just be a glitch in the data. 2. Look At Recent Algorithm Updates: Algorithm updates happen all the time and it's easy to miss one. You can use "Google Search Status Dashboard" to see if Google has reported a ranking update. You can also use Ahrefs/GA or other tools to overlay algorithm updates on your traffic timeline charts. 3. Review Large Scale Technical Issues: Next, you'll want to be sure you're not seeing a large scale technical issues hurt site performance. Using an auditing tools to check for any many technical issues. For instance, I look for site wide 4xx errors, noindex tag, blocked crawls. 4. Check For Content Changes: This is often one of the biggest reasons for a drop. A site changes a massive amount of content without an SEO realizing - which impacts the content quality and optimization. Despina notes how you can use Ahrefs "Content Changes" feature to see exactly what content has changed. 5. Look At Your Page Growth: You should also look at the total number of pages on your site. If you're seeing that traffic dropped and you lost a bunch of pages, these pages may have been key to organic traffic. You can do this by using Ahref's "Organic Pages" report. 6. Review Competitors: You'll also want to see if any key competitors have seen big market share increases while you've dropped. In your ranking tools, you can add your competitors to see their organic traffic trends. If you notice any going up around the same time you saw declines, they might be winning on queries you used to perform well for. 7. Document Your Findings: Along the way, you'll want to structure your findings into a formal report that you can provide to your client or key stakeholders. 8. Monitor Improvement: Finally, you'll want to ensure that you have monitoring systems in place (traffic, rankings, conversions) to be able to report on whether or not you're improving from any proposed changes. Loved this article and found some interested reports within Ahrefs to use for analyzing large drops in organic traffic.

Ever wonder why organic traffic/rankings decreased or increased on your website? Here's the process I use in under two minutes to identify what content changes may have either tanked or increased traffic to a website: 1) In tools like GSC or AHREF's, compare the day after the drop to the day before. This will uncover what page dropped. 2) Enter the affected URL in Ahrefs Site Explorer 3) Click on the green dot in the graph view    This little-known feature is hidden in plain sight, but it's a goldmine for troubleshooting. 4) Review the before/after snapshots    Ahrefs shows you exactly what changed - from major content rewrites to tiny HTML tweaks that might have broken your schema markup. 5) Look for critical missing elements    Often it's what was removed that causes the damage - a deleted H1, product specs, section of content removed. 6) Fix what was broken and document it  Restore the elements that were working, then create a change management process so this doesn't happen again. Use this feature to: ✅ Diagnose causes to rankings fluctuations ✅ Audit content evolution over time ✅ Track changes from top competitors This saves scrambling to find the issue and overcompensating with changes that make the situation worse. Enjoy!