Trend scan

A total for the last twelve months can look perfectly healthy while five of those months were a steady slide. The total hides the direction. That is how a site quietly loses half its traffic while every report says it is fine.

So the first question is always: which way is it going? Not how much traffic there is, but whether there is more or less of it than there was. A site that is losing traffic needs a report that opens by saying so. Anything else is the wrong report, however good the rest of it is.

When to run it

First, before anything else. Before the other skills, before the outline, before you start writing. What you find here changes what the whole report should say and what order the recommendations go in.

What you need