Traffic doesn't lie. But it does mislead if you look at it in isolation.

The monthly traffic review isn't about celebrating wins or panicking at drops. It's about spotting direction early enough to respond before a small shift compounds into a real problem.

In Google Search Console, go to Performance and set the date range to the last 3 months. Compare to the previous 3 months. One bad week is noise. A direction over 12 weeks is a signal.

Start with impressions. If impressions are rising but clicks aren't following, your content is showing up but not getting clicked — that's a title or meta description problem, not a ranking problem. If both impressions and clicks are dropping on a specific page, something changed: your ranking slipped, a competitor jumped above you, or the search intent shifted and your page no longer matches what people want. Pull up that page in the Pages tab and check which queries are declining.

In your analytics tool (PostHog, Google Analytics, or whatever you use), look at traffic by channel. Which sources are growing, which are shrinking? A drop in organic offset by direct or referral traffic suggests your brand is growing even if SEO is temporarily flat. A drop across all channels is a site-wide problem worth investigating immediately.

For the tracking rhythm: in month one, establish a baseline — total clicks, impressions, average position. In month two, compare and flag any page that dropped more than 20% in clicks. Those are your priority fixes. In month three, check whether the pages you updated recovered. Did new pages start gaining impressions?

That three-month loop keeps you managing proactively instead of reacting to algorithm changes after the damage is done.

A spike in impressions with no clicks usually means you started ranking for a new keyword that isn't well-matched to your page — either update the page to target it properly, or ignore it if it's irrelevant. A page losing positions by 5–10 over two months is typically outpaced by a competitor who published a more thorough version of the same content. Pull up that competing page and see what they cover that you don't. A sudden drop across all traffic in a single week usually points to a technical issue: pages accidentally set to noindex, a sitemap problem, a redirect loop. Check the Coverage report in GSC immediately.

The goal of this monthly review is simple: catch problems before they become expensive, spot opportunities before competitors do.