Identify Search Maintenance

Find pages that merit search-maintenance work, with evidence that separates rank-driven losses from changes in demand. The deliverable is a ranked investigation backlog and diagnosis; it is never an article rewrite or publishing task.

Scope and guardrails

• Confirm the property, traffic channel, dates, locale/device, and whether Google must be inspected through the user's signed-in Chrome session.
• Use both recent comparison (normally the latest 3 months vs. the preceding 3 months) and a year-over-year comparison (normally the same recent 3 months one year earlier). End periods on the latest Search Console date that is complete enough to compare, use equal day counts and comparable weekday mix, and state any unavailable baseline as N/A, never as zero.
• Fix the Search Console search type, country, device, property scope, canonical-URL handling, and any brand-query exclusion across each comparison. Record GA4 timezone, Organic Search channel definition, and landing-page URL normalization.
• Treat a page as a candidate only after checking page-level and query-level Search Console data. GA4 is corroborating traffic evidence, not a substitute for query and rank data.
• Do not attribute a loss to rankings from clicks alone. URL-filtered and property-wide Search Console impressions are affected by the site's own visibility and are not standalone demand measures. Check an independent demand proxy (for example Google Trends for the query/topic, Keyword Planner where available, or a documented market-data source), then use property-wide query data only as corroboration. Also check URL/query rank changes, cannibalization, and live SERP composition.
• Do not alter CMS content, metadata, internal links, or publish settings. If the user asks for changes, finish this investigation first and obtain a separate article-update scope.

Workflow

1. Collect comparable evidence