Auditing after a traffic drop: first find out what exactly went down

From the data. While it's not clear what exactly fell, any check of the site gives a list of general observations unrelated to your fall. We take Search Console, compare two periods by pages, queries, countries and devices and look at the outline: is it the entire site, one section or one language branch. An outline and a date narrow down the cause more than any checklist.

By the shape of the curve and by the contour. The update is usually stretched over several days and hits unevenly across page types. Own error more often gives a cliff in one day and a clear outline: one section, one language, one template. When the date coincides with both the update and your release - and this happens - we separate them by logs and by which addresses stopped receiving impressions.

From the site map, and this is not a formality. In the cosmetics wholesaler, we counted 4,167 addresses in the canonical map — 3,947 products, 166 brands, 47 categories — and no addresses in a second language version, although bilingualism is implemented and declared via hreflang. In such a situation, the search engine receives a signal that the second version simply does not exist. A fair margin of the mechanism: the map itself does not raise positions, it only makes pages exist for crawling - Google directly documents this.

Maybe it happens more often than it seems. Measurement from the same store: the canonical map gives 3,947 products, and the old one lives in parallel at the standard address - 7,782 entries, of which only 2,755 are unique; 2,454 addresses are repeated three times, about 2,706 commercial ones. That is, it is duplicated and incomplete at the same time. We warn you right away: after cleaning duplicates, the number of pages in the index may drop at first. This is an expected course, not a deterioration, but if it is not told in advance, it looks unpleasant.

Then the first point of the audit will be about this. We checked the live pages of a natural cosmetics brand for the EU market and found no counter - no tag manager, no gtag, no pixel. There are 23 products in the catalog, three language versions with correct hreflang, six types of structured data, the first response is 512.6 ms: the site is made neatly, and there is nothing to restore the behavior of visitors. The meter itself does not improve anything, it only gives an opportunity to see - that is why we place the measurement in parallel with the diagnosis, and not after it.

Technical stuff is rescanned in 2-6 weeks - hence the 4 and 8 week checkpoints. If there is no movement after eight weeks, the hypothesis was wrong, and we write this directly, instead of suggesting "wait a little longer". Separately: if the reason is that competitors have made better pages, no amount of rescanning will help - there needs to be work on the content, not corrections.

The honest answer is known only after diagnosis. Technical reasons — the language version has dropped, the redirect is broken, the map returns an empty body — are usually reversible. Loss of items due to stronger competitors can be reversed only with work and definitely not in a week. We include this division in the document as a separate section and do not name the numbers to which we will "return".

Regular. A season, a change in demand, the disappearance of an item from the range, a change in the delivery format at your request - all this causes a drop without any error on your part. Therefore, we compare the dynamics with the demand in the industry before looking for culprits within the site. Otherwise, you can spend a month fixing something that didn't break, and lose the season in that month.

The key is Search Console with history: it's the only source where you can see impressions and conversions before the drop. Server logs are next in importance: the most accurate way to see a change in bot behavior, but not all hosting stores store them, and the depth is often a week or two. Analytics is desirable, its absence does not block work. Without a webmaster's office, diagnosis turns into guesswork - in this case, we take it up only after access appears.