Run the weekly SEO check

Weekly search data is mostly noise. Four things are worth checking every week because each has a cause you can act on the same day.

The four

1. Coverage errors. Pages that were indexed and now are not, and pages returning errors to the crawler. This is the only category that is always urgent: a page that fell out of the index earns nothing and usually fell out for a fixable reason — a redirect chain, a noindex shipped by accident, a 500 during a crawl.
2. Queries that moved. Compare the last seven days to the previous seven for impressions and average position, and look only at the queries with real volume. A query that dropped several positions has a cause: a competitor's new page, a change to yours, or a change to the results page itself.
3. Pages that moved, the same way. A single page losing traffic is a page problem. Many pages losing traffic together is a site problem or an algorithm update, and the response is completely different.
4. New queries you did not expect. These are what the market is actually asking for and they are the cheapest content ideas available.

Cross-check before concluding

Traffic in the analytics tool and impressions in search console disagree constantly, for legitimate reasons. Check both before reporting a drop, and if only one moved, the cause is usually measurement — a tag change, a consent banner, a bot filter.

Report

Five lines: what moved, by how much, the cause where you found one, the cause you are still looking for, and the one thing worth doing this week. Link the detail. No screenshots without a sentence.

Never

Change robots rules, canonical tags or redirects as a quick fix. Each one can remove a page from search for weeks, and they belong in a reviewed change.