Insights / Visibility & Authority
Your rankings are dropping. What should you check first?
Fewer keywords, lower positions, fewer clicks and fewer leads are different problems. Find out which one you have before you change anything.
The report lands, and the line is going the wrong way.
Fewer keywords. Lower positions. Somebody suggests it’s an algorithm update. Somebody else says AI is eating search. A third person wants to rewrite every page.
Any of them could be right. More often, nobody has looked yet.
A falling number isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a symptom, and five different symptoms tend to get called “our rankings dropped.”
The real question isn’t how to get the rankings back. It’s what actually fell, and whether it costs you business.
Five numbers that get confused
Tracked keywords is how many search terms a third-party tool says you rank for. It’s an estimate built from the tool’s own sample. It can drop because the tool changed what it collects.
Ranking is your position for a specific query. Search Console reports an average position, which moves when you start appearing for new, weaker queries, not only when you slip.
Impressions are how often your pages were shown in Google results.
Clicks are how often someone came through.
Leads are the enquiries, calls and bookings that matter. A ranking report tells you nothing about these.
Only the last one pays the bills. Start there and work backwards.
Match the symptom to the check
| What you see | What it can mean | Check first |
|---|---|---|
| Tracked keyword count fell, Search Console looks steady | The tool’s data changed, or you lost low-value terms | Compare clicks and impressions in Search Console for the same dates |
| Average position fell | Real slippage on key queries, or new queries diluting the average | Filter Search Console by the queries and pages that bring enquiries |
| Impressions fell across the site | Indexing problems, a site change, a technical fault, or lower demand | Page indexing report, recent site changes, seasonal patterns |
| Clicks fell, impressions steady | Answers on the results page, a weaker title, or a competitor’s richer listing | Search the query yourself and see what now sits above you |
| Leads fell, traffic steady | Broken forms, tracking, phone routing, or a change on the page | Submit your own forms, call your own number, check analytics events |
A starting point, not a complete list. Your data decides.
Check in this order
Cheap, common causes first. Strategy last.
Confirm the tracking still works.
Is analytics still installed on every page? Did someone change the tag manager, consent banner or form plugin? A lost tag looks exactly like lost traffic.
Look for anything that changed on the site.
A redesign, a new platform, changed URLs, merged pages, a new theme. Migrations without proper redirects are among the most common causes of a real drop. Check the dates against the decline.
Check what Google can index.
Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. Use URL Inspection on your most important pages. Look for accidental noindex tags, blocked sections in robots.txt, or canonicals pointing at the wrong page.
Rule out technical faults.
Server errors, slow or failing pages, expired certificates, a hosting or CDN rule blocking crawlers. If your site was down or unreachable, Search Console often shows it.
Check whether demand moved.
Compare the same period last year. Many services are seasonal. Fewer people searching isn’t a ranking problem and no amount of optimization fixes it.
See who’s above you now.
Search your key queries. Has a competitor published something better? Is Google showing an AI Overview, a map pack or a video where you used to sit? That tells you what you’re up against.
Before we recommend anything, we ask why.
What about AI and Google updates?
Both are real. Google updates its systems, and some updates reward pages that show more experience and usefulness. AI Overviews and AI tools answer some questions before anyone clicks. Either can cost you traffic.
But neither is a diagnosis on its own. A drop that lines up with your own redesign is probably your redesign. A drop in clicks with steady impressions points at the results page, not your content. Blaming the algorithm without checking is how businesses rewrite good pages and leave a broken redirect in place.
If the evidence does point at changing search behaviour, the response is better answers, not more pages. Here’s what a useful page needs. And if fewer people click even when they see you, you’ll need a different way to measure. Whether AI tools mention you is a separate question with its own checks. Here’s how the two relate.
When a drop doesn’t matter
Sometimes the keyword count falls because you stopped ranking for terms nobody who buys from you would ever type. Positions slip on a query that never brought an enquiry. That’s noise.
A falling line isn’t a death sentence. It’s a prompt to look. If leads are steady and the queries that matter are holding, you may have nothing to fix.
Find out what fell.
Find out why.
Then decide whether it’s worth fixing.