Pages That Lost Traffic in August

Why look now rather than then

In September the rollout had barely finished and any movement was as likely to be noise as effect.

Four months later the figures have settled, the seasonal pattern is visible, and any change has had time to be either real or temporary.

This is also the last quiet moment before the new year, which makes it the practical time.

And the conclusion matters, because it determines whether the answer is to fix something or to leave it alone.

Look page by page, not site-wide

Since the site total tells you almost nothing.

A site can be flat overall while a third of its pages moved substantially in opposite directions.

Export traffic by landing page for two periods: roughly June and July against roughly October and November.

Sort by the change and look at the twenty that fell most and the twenty that rose most.

The interesting question is not how much moved, it is whether the pages that moved have anything in common.

That comparison takes about twenty minutes with a spreadsheet, and it is the only version of this question worth answering.

Rule out the ordinary explanations first

• Seasonality, which is most of it.
• A page you changed or removed.
• Advertising starting or stopping.
• A link that disappeared.
• A site problem: speed, an error, a broken template.
• A competitor publishing something better.

The first accounts for most apparent effects, which is why comparing the same months last year matters more than comparing this June with this November.

What the pattern would look like

If the update genuinely affected you.

The pages that fell would share a character: produced in volume, generic, covering topics outside what you actually do, or written to a word count.

The pages that held would be the ones written from your own work, with figures and specifics.

And the fall would be concentrated around late August to mid-September rather than spread across the autumn.

Where the losers have nothing in common and the timing is diffuse, the cause was probably something else.

Be honest about this, since attributing an ordinary decline to an update produces the wrong response.

A worked example

A business believed the August update had cost them traffic and wanted the site rewritten.

Comparing page by page, the fall was almost entirely on four pages about a seasonal service, and the same pattern appeared in the previous year's figures.

Two other pages had fallen sharply, both of which had been consolidated into a third page in September by their developer.

Nothing else had moved meaningfully, and the pages written from the owner's own experience were slightly up.

The conclusion was that the update had done nothing visible to them.

They spent the budget on two new pages instead of a rewrite, which was a considerably better use of it.

If it did affect you

The response, which is unglamorous.

Improve the pages worth improving: add the figures, the exceptions, and the specifics they lack, and put a name on the advisory ones.

Remove or merge the ones that were never going to be worth improving, after checking each for links and conversions.

Do not rewrite everything, which makes any future comparison impossible and risks the pages that were working.

And expect recovery to be slow and partial, since the signal is described as continuous and reassessment takes time.

Record what you changed and when, so next year's version of this exercise has something to read against.

Check what rose as well

Which is the half nobody examines.

Pages that gained traffic across the same window are telling you what works on your site, in your market, right now.

Look at what they have that the others do not, and it is usually specificity: a price, a process, a real example.

That is a better guide to what to write next than any general advice, including this.

Two or three risers frequently point at a subject worth expanding, which is the most useful outcome this exercise produces.

Write down the conclusion

Since this will be asked again.

One paragraph: what moved, what you ruled out, what you concluded, and what you did about it.

Next time somebody asks whether an update affected you, that paragraph is the answer rather than a fresh guess.

It also stops the same investigation being repeated in six months by somebody who was not involved.

And it records the figures you were comparing against, which is the part that becomes impossible to reconstruct later.

Traffic is not the number that matters

Worth holding onto through the whole exercise.

A page can lose a third of its visitors and produce the same number of enquiries, because what it lost was people who were never going to make contact.

That is a good outcome dressed as a bad one, and it is common where a page had been ranking for something broad.

So check enquiries alongside traffic for the same pages, and treat a fall in visitors with no fall in enquiries as no problem at all.

The reverse is the one to worry about: steady traffic and fewer enquiries means something changed on the page rather than in the results.

The counter-case

Attribution is genuinely hard and this method is approximate.

Several things change at once in any four-month window, and separating them is not really possible at small volume.

Most sites were unaffected by any given update, and the honest answer after twenty minutes is frequently that nothing identifiable happened.

That is a legitimate conclusion rather than a failure of the exercise.

Compare page by page, rule out the ordinary causes, look at the risers, and write down what you decided.

The twenty minutes

1. Export traffic by landing page for two periods.
2. Sort by change, both directions.
3. Check the same months last year.
4. Rule out changes you made yourself.
5. Ask what the losers have in common.
6. Look at what rose and why.
7. Write one paragraph of conclusion.

Step three is what prevents the most common error, since a seasonal decline looks exactly like an update effect until you compare it with the previous year.

The practical response is covered in thin pages you created for every town.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.