You know from experience how to find things on the web. One of those ways – and still probably one of the major ways – is to use a search engine. You might type or say several words in a particular order and expect to find your answer in at least the first few tries.

When you’re a blogger, you probably do have some traffic because a search engine brought one or more people to your post. Hopefully, you already have an analytics program set up so you can see things like where and when people are landing, where they came from, and how long they stay. And if you already have Google Search Console set up for your site, you can see how they got there.

Search Console is good for a good many other things too, but in this post I just want to concentrate on one thing you can do with it that is very, very handy. It won’t apply to all situations, but if you find yourself in ONE particular situation, this step-by-step tutorial may prove to be very helpful. I’m just writing it for people I know; I don’t really intend for it to be shared widely, and I’m password protecting it just to keep it out of the general search engines. (Not because it’s top secret but because Google changes things OFTEN and it might become irrelevant or incorrect quickly.)

Here’s the situation: You have a page on your website, a particular URL, that gets good traffic from Google search, then, for some obscure reason, your traffic to that page from search just tanks. It’s starts dropping like a rock in a pond – that is to say, steadily, inexorably. It doesn’t disappear overnight (that would more likely indicate a technical error, or Google de-indexing the page entirely).

If you have changed the page recently, you may be able to find what the problem is by using Google Search Console – but only if you already had it set up, and preferably if you’ve have it set up for more than 3 months at a minimum.

Here are the steps to find keywords your post used to rank for:

Note: these steps assume you’re looking at Search Console in a browser window, not the app.

• Sign in to Search Console
• Click on Search Results. You should see it in the left menu under the heading “Performance.”
• Next, change the date range to whatever is appropriate for what you’re looking for. By default, it’s “Last 3 months,” but you can change it. Since you’re trying to find keywords you used to rank for, you want to see a time period before the drop in traffic. Do this by choosing Custom and entering relevant dates that exclude the most recent month or season.
• Now click +New and select Page…
• Type in at least one of the words in the URL of the page you want to look at.
• Now, scroll down the page slightly to the results. Don’t pay attention to the queries yet. Instead, you need to click on the Pages tab.
• Look at your choices. You should see the specific page you need to information about. Select that by clicking on it. Now you’re only looking at information that pertains to that particular URL.
• NOW, go back to the Queries tab. By default, the queries are usually in the best order to see what was bringing the most people, so the top 5 or 10 queries are likely the ones you want to keep in your article.
• You can click around, reorder the results, see what there is to see. It’s interesting, but the top few queries are most likely what you needed.

Armed with that information, go back to your blog post and figure out what is missing.

• How to find out whether the keyword is still in your page’s content (Windows computers):
  • Press CTRL and F (for “Find”) at the same time on the keyboard.
  • A small search bar will pop up on your screen.
  • Simply type in the phrase exactly as it appears in Search Console.
• If the word or phrase is no longer in your blog post, but it used to be, add it back. If the word or phrase is no longer relevant, you might still be able to figure out a way to include it, like: “The popular xyz keyword is no longer available.”
• Not all keywords or phrases have to be exact matches. That used to be important but it is probably less so now. If your article used to rank for these phrases and you can’t find any mention of them, do try adding them back. If you have several variations of that phrase but not the exact phrase, then adding an exact match might not help. This is about educated guessing.
• Give it a few days or even weeks and see if things turn around. I HAVE seen a post that got all of all of its traffic back, but it was several years ago and the missing keyword was very clear, so when we put it back, the traffic came back.