Fewer people clicked through to the website from Google search results than in the comparison period. Search is often a website’s biggest free source of visitors, so a fall here is worth explaining quickly.
What it means
Clicks fall when the website ranks lower, appears for fewer searches, or fewer people search for its topics. The issue’s details say which: whether average position slipped, or impressions fell while position held steady.
What triggers it
SaaSMaestro compares Search Console clicks for the current period (the workspace’s comparison period, 28 days by default) with the period before, or with the same days last year if that’s your comparison setting. It’s raised when clicks fell by at least your search clicks alert threshold (20% by default) from at least 50. It’s High severity.
If visitors fell past their threshold too, the drop is raised as “Visitors down” instead. The details add the change against the same days last year, any timeline note in the period and any broad Google update that rolled out during it.
Like the other checks on Google data, it’s paused while the website’s Google connection is broken or stale, or while GA4 tracking looks broken.
Common causes
- A Google core update or another broad ranking update.
- Pages lost rankings to competitors, or were changed, moved or removed.
- Pages dropped out of Google’s index because of a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, a redirect or server errors.
- Seasonal demand: fewer people search for the topic at this time of year.
How to fix it
- In Search Console’s Performance report, compare the two periods by query and by page to see which searches and pages lost the clicks.
- If position slipped, compare those pages with the results now above them and improve them. See Top searches lost ground in Google.
- If impressions fell at a steady position, look for pages that dropped out of the index. See Search impressions down.
- If the drop lines up with a Google update, avoid hasty changes: give rankings a few weeks to settle, then improve the pages that lost the most.
When it clears
SaaSMaestro re-checks every time it analyses the workspace, using data synced from Google every six hours, and the issue clears as soon as the problem is no longer found.
Because it compares two periods, it can also clear once the numbers settle at a lower level, since the period before then looks the same. Check the trend chart before treating that as a recovery.
An action that stays clear for 7 days drops off the plan. If you marked it done but the problem is still found 14 days later, it returns as “Fix didn’t work”. See Using the action plan.