# Organic Traffic Decline Diagnosis

Separate technical, demand, competition, intent, quality, seasonality, measurement, indexing, and site-change causes of an organic traffic decline.

## Usage note

Use this worksheet before making broad content or technical changes in response to a traffic drop. Preserve baseline exports and annotate deployments, migrations, reporting changes, outages, and campaigns. Search performance has multiple causes and normal volatility; the template supports a structured investigation but cannot establish that any one algorithm, competitor, or edit caused the decline.

## How to use this template

1. Confirm measurement integrity and define the magnitude, start date, baseline, seasonality, and business effect.
2. Segment clicks, impressions, position, CTR, pages, queries, devices, countries, and conversions.
3. Overlay technical changes, outages, migrations, content edits, demand events, and result shifts.
4. Write evidence-based hypotheses with predicted signals and prioritized tests.
5. Implement scoped fixes, annotate them, validate deployment, and monitor without confounding changes.

## Blank template

### Decline definition

- **Property and data sources:** [Search Console, analytics, logs]
- **Affected metric:** [Clicks, impressions, sessions, conversions, other]
- **Start date:** [Observed break point]
- **Comparison periods:** [Current and baseline]
- **Magnitude:** [Absolute and percentage with baseline]
- **Seasonality or prior spike:** [Relevant context]
- **Business effect:** [Tasks or outcomes affected]
- **Tracking changes:** [Consent, tag, filter, property, or None]

### Segmentation and hypothesis

- **Affected pages or directory:** [Scope]
- **Affected query intent:** [Brand, task, topic, or stage]
- **Country/device/search appearance:** [Concentration]
- **Impressions/position/CTR pattern:** [What changed]
- **Technical evidence:** [Status, canonical, robots, rendering, links]
- **Recent site changes:** [Deployment and dates]
- **External changes:** [Demand, result features, competition, season]
- **Hypothesis:** [Cause and mechanism]
- **Predicted confirming signal:** [What should be visible]
- **Test or fix:** [Scoped action]

### Investigation checks

- [ ] Measurement changes and reporting delays were ruled out.
- [ ] Baseline and current periods are genuinely comparable.
- [ ] Loss is segmented before a cause is proposed.
- [ ] Technical indexability and availability are checked.
- [ ] Demand and intent changes are considered.
- [ ] Hypotheses name predicted evidence.
- [ ] Changes are scoped, reversible where possible, and annotated.
- [ ] Validation and monitoring owners are assigned.