Spotting a Major SEO Technical Issue Early

I check the Google Search Console for all my clients every few days. 99% of the time, nothing comes out of it via an emergency. However, that 1% of the time did happen for one of my #NationalSEO clients, which caused me to investigate the problem. I noticed that the Google SEO traffic began dropping for the first time in months, just a week before the holidays, which was strange. Google Search Console is 2-3 days behind the current day, so I then went into Google Analytics and confirmed the traffic drop. From there, I reviewed the error report in GSC and noticed a spike in soft 404s, which was odd. I then ran the entire site through Screaming Frog/Sitebulb and noticed that soft 404s were being reported.

Long story short, there was an issue with a significant 301 redirect in the HTACCESS file. The rewrite rule was treating the 301 redirect as a soft 404, which meant Google (and Bing) were removing the pages from their indexes, causing the traffic drop.

In short, potential (and even current) clients often ask me about the value of having me on a monthly basis. Even when things are good, as you can see in the chart above, where traffic is growing, you have to keep an eye on the account. SEO traffic for them accounts for around 40% of their sales and traffic, so a disruption to that expected traffic will be noticeable.

Quickly seeing that there was a problem, running checks, and implementing a fix in a few days reversed that traffic drop.

Timestamps
0:00 I Check My Clients Weekly
0:32 What is a Soft 404?
1:08 The Obvious Traffic Decline Check
1:25 Tested that Page in GSC
1:53 GSC Showed Me a List of Soft 404 Pages
2:16 Bing Saw the Same Soft 404 Problem
2:44 The SEO Steps I Took to Fix the Problem
4:13 Traffic is Now Rebounding
4:38 In Summary

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