Typical project
Technical SEO audit after a drop in traffic: how to find the cause
How we look for the cause of a drop in traffic: what the Search Console data says, what changed on the site, what a botched migration looks like and how we order the fixes, with no promise of recovery.
A technical SEO audit requested after a drop in traffic is rather like an investigation: first you establish exactly what fell and when, and only then do you look for the culprit. The rush to “fix something” before the diagnosis piles new changes on top of a problem nobody yet understands.
Broadly, the causes fall into three groups: something broke on the site, Google changed the way it assesses sites, or the market changed (season, competitors, less interest). Each leaves different traces in the data.
What actually fell: the Search Console data
For every page and every search, Google Search Console shows impressions (how many times you appeared in the results), clicks and average position, with more than a year of history if the site had already been added there; otherwise the data starts only on the day it was added. We look here first, not at the traffic statistics: a tracking code that has stopped working or a new consent banner can “lose” visits that are in fact still happening.
We compare the period after the drop with an equivalent one before it and, for seasonal businesses, with the same period last year. Then we break the data down by page, search, country and device until the drop takes shape.
- Fewer impressions: indexing, rankings or lower demand.
- Same impressions, fewer clicks: the results page has changed or your title is less appealing.
- A single type of page: almost certainly a change to a template or to the structure.
- The whole site, on the same day: a technical block, a migration or a manual action.
- Gradual: outdated content and competitors who have done better work.
Indexing, blocks and recent changes to the site
The indexing report says how many pages are in Google’s database and why the others are missing. We look for jumps: pages marked noindex (the tag that asks for removal from the results), URLs blocked in robots.txt, server errors. We then go through the site with a crawler, a program that follows links the way Google’s bot does, and compare what it finds with what ought to exist.
At the same time we reconstruct the timeline: a new theme, an updated plugin, a rebuilt menu, deleted copy, merged categories, a change of hosting. Often the most useful document is the developer’s change log.
We also check whether there is a manual action (a penalty applied by a Google reviewer and announced in Search Console) or a hacked site, with injected pages that are not yours, which is losing traffic for reasons unrelated to SEO.
A migration gone wrong and the redirects that were lost
Changing the domain, the platform or the URL structure is the moment when traffic is most easily lost. A permanent (301) redirect tells Google that the page has moved and where to. Without it, the old URL becomes an error and the new one starts from scratch.
The signs are easy to recognise: every old URL pointing to the homepage, redirect chains, temporary redirects in place of permanent ones, important pages with no counterpart, a canonical still pointing to the old domain (the canonical is the tag with which a page indicates the URL of its main version).
If there is a list of the old URLs (an old sitemap, an export from Search Console, a backup), we rebuild the map: each old URL to the closest new page. The sooner the work is done, the better the chances of recovery.
Speed and Google updates: real causes, rarely on their own
Core Web Vitals are three Google measurements of the experience of using a page: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to an action and how much the content “jumps about” while it loads. They can get worse after a new theme or a few added scripts, but they rarely explain a big fall on their own.
Google updates its ranking systems periodically and announces the major updates publicly. If the date of the drop coincides with one of them and we find nothing technical, there is no single fix: we compare the pages that lost ground with the ones that took their place and work on quality.
The remediation plan that closes a technical SEO audit
The fixes are carried out by us or by your developer. What we do not promise: a return to the previous figures. The traffic lost to a technical error caught early is, as a rule, largely recovered; a reassessment of the content by Google or a changed market takes work and time, with no certain outcome.
The report is not a list of hundreds of warnings pulled out of a tool. Each finding comes with the evidence, the estimated effect and the effort, and the order is that of urgency:
- Urgent: everything that blocks indexing (a wrong noindex, robots.txt, missing redirects, server errors).
- Important: canonicals, broken internal links, duplicate pages, an out-of-date sitemap.
- To plan: speed, templates, thin or outdated content.
- To monitor: whatever does not depend on the site, such as the season or changes to the results page.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an audit take?
It depends mainly on how many types of page the site has and on how well the recent changes are documented. A small site with full access to the data is far quicker to work through than a large store that has been through a migration.
What do you need in order to start?
Read access to Search Console and to the traffic statistics, the approximate date of the drop and the list of changes made to the site in that period. A copy of the old site also helps, if there was a migration.
Can we carry out the fixes ourselves?
Yes. The plan is written so that a developer can work from it, with each problem explained and with example pages. At the end we check that the fixes have been applied correctly.
This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.