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!

2. See if your content is still competitive

As I mentioned before, a lot of the time you lose rankings because competitors have created better content than you. They may have more appealing title tags, more in-depth content, faster page speed, or simply a better on-page experience.

An easy place to start is by using a content tool to see if your content is still up-to-snuff.

Uh oh, according to MarketMuse, we are 13 points below target. Let’s see what our competitors’ scores are….

Yeah, we are no longer competitive.

3. Optimize your content

Re-optimizing your content can involve A LOT of things. In this instance, the clearest issue is that our content depth is too low.

We are going to use a content writing tool like Clearscope or MarketMuse to write a more thorough article, then republish it.

It’s important that you only modify the content! Do not create a new piece of content, and do not rewrite the URL.

Very bad things will happen.

After rewriting and republishing the new, improved content, here is what happened to our average ranking position…

And here is the traffic that rebounded as a result of the ranking improvement…

Conclusion

Losing just one or two positions for a critical keyword can have an insane impact on your traffic. In the example above, we lost about 2/3 of our traffic via our target keyword.

By using Search Console we were able to identify all the pages losing traffic, diagnose the causes, and quickly react.

Again, simply reacting to keyword monitoring tools is not enough! You need a full picture of what’s happening to your content, not just a few keywords.