Traffic data doesn't lie, but it misleads constantly if you look at it in isolation.

The monthly traffic review isn't about celebrating wins or stressing about drops. It's about spotting patterns early enough to do something before they get worse.

In Google Search Console, go to Performance. Set the date range to the last 3 months and compare it to the 3 months before that. You want a trend, not a snapshot. One bad week is noise. A consistent direction over 12 weeks is something worth acting on.

Start with impressions. If impressions are rising but clicks aren't following, your pages are appearing in search but not getting clicked. That's a meta description or title problem, not a ranking problem. Fix the copy first.

If both impressions and clicks are dropping on a specific page, something shifted. Your ranking slipped, a competitor jumped above you, or the search intent changed and your page no longer matches what people want. Go to the Pages tab, click into that page, and check which queries are declining.

Check your analytics for channel trends. In PostHog or Google Analytics, look at traffic by source. Which channels are growing? A drop in organic offset by direct or referral traffic means your brand is growing even if SEO is flat. A drop across all channels is usually technical.

Run this as a 3-month loop. Month one: establish your baseline — total clicks, impressions, average position. Month two: compare and flag pages that dropped more than 20% in clicks. Those are your priority fixes. Month three: check if the pages you updated recovered. Did new pages start gaining impressions?

This rhythm keeps you from reacting in a panic to every Google update and helps you tell actual problems apart from temporary fluctuations.

A spike in impressions with no clicks usually means you started ranking for a keyword that doesn't match your page — either update the page to target it properly, or ignore it if it's irrelevant. A page dropping 5-10 positions over two months is almost always being outranked by a competitor who published a better version. Pull up their page, see what they cover that you don't, and update. A sudden across-the-board traffic drop in a single week is usually technical: pages accidentally set to noindex, a sitemap issue, or a redirect problem. Check the Coverage report in GSC right away.