Using Search Console to proactively fix declining rankings.

Losing a keyword position that you've owned seemingly forever sucks...

And it's usually the result of a competitor doing something better than you.

They either wrote a new piece of content that is now edging you out, or the re-optimized their existing content, and Google is giving them a shot at your old position.

Either way, you're in trouble and you need to react quickly.

I'm going to explain how to first identify slipping content, then how to address it.

1. Use Search Console to see what's slipping

Sometimes watching your keyword monitoring tool isn't enough to understand what's happening with your content performance.

Most content ranks for multiple keywords, and sometimes hundreds or even thousands! This particular page drives traffic via 293 keywords...

So tracking one individual keyword isn't always the most effective way to really get a pulse for what's happening with a single piece of content.

So what we want to do is use Search Console to compare one time frame to another to evaluate which content is losing overall clicks.

I'll use a month-over-month comparison to compare clicks to content:

Then I'll click into the "pages" tab, and sort by the content that lost the most clicks in the most recent month.

Check out the page below, it lost 830 clicks from one month to the next! BRUTAL.

I'll click on that page to isolate it, then tab over to "queries" to see which keywords lost the most traffic.

Most keywords lost clicks, but they were all centered around a specific theme. This one is simple, so I'm going to click on the keyword that lost the most clicks to isolate it.

I need to find out:

1. Did the keyword lose positioning? Or...
2. Was there a natural seasonality to the keyword? Or...
3. Did the CTR slip for other reasons?

I'll start by evaluating impressions. I want to see if the search volume for this keyword was stable.

It doesn't look like seasonality caused it. Must be something different. Now I'll click on "average position" to see if a drop caused a decrease in click-through rate.

Well that seems to be the problem! I'll now look at the last 16 months of data so that I can get an idea if this ranking fluctuation is a normal thing, or just a recent thing.

Nope! We definitely got bumped out of position one and are now hovering around position 2-3. It's time for damage control!... Click here for the rest of this article's awesome insights!