Read: 2 minutesNear the end of 2014, Aleyda Solis published a resource to help marketers diagnose organic traffic drops. Fittingly, the resource can be found at whymytrafficdropped.com.
Aleyda’s resource is great, but I saw the need for a few updates, e.g. mentions of Webmaster Tools should be changed to Search Console and the recommendation to use Google Keyword Planner for seasonal keyword trend data isn’t as helpful now as it once was. Add that to my need to physically mark items in some way off of anything labeled as a “checklist” and you get the reason for this post.
I took the liberty of transferring her work into a Google sheet, swapping out some of the tools she suggests with tools that do the same job but are more widely used here at 97th Floor e.g. SEMRush for Ahrefs, and of course, made other small tweaks mentioned above to align the recommendations with the current state of the industry.
The sections covered in the checklist include:
- A web analytics tracking problem?
- A seasonality or search trend change?
- A content accessibility & crawl-ability issue?
- A content indexation issue?
- A Search Console misconfiguration?
- A web security problem
- A manual penalty
- An algorithm update
Each section features rows of individual checklist items and columns for listing and linking to specific tools. After you download the sheet and make a copy, you'll be able to add in your own tools and add or remove checklist items as well.
It is “view only” so you’ll need to make your own copy to reformat things how you’d like and add your own personal checklist items. On that note, we’d love to hear how you would improve the checklist, so leave a comment and let us know!
