Identify the topics that you might be losing ranks for—and causing lost traffic

Once you have a set of pages that are losing traffic, you can focus on the topics those pages cover. Falling traffic might indicate those topics are losing visibility on search results pages—meaning your competition might be winning for the keywords you are targeting.

You can use the Page Details and Keywords reports in Conductor to understand which keywords your pages rank for, and which you've been seeing drops in rank along with drops in traffic.

1. If you haven't already, follow the steps described in the Uncover opportunity by identifying underperforming content lesson. From the pages you identified, choose one to start your investigation.
2. Click the page in the table on the Pages report to go to its Page Details report.
3. Scroll to the bottom-most table on Page Details and sort the Rank Change column to show the keywords with the the biggest loss in rank position at the top.
4. Make a note of the keywords that saw the biggest losses in rank. Keywords that would have the biggest effect on traffic would be those that dropped out of positions 1-3 or off of page 1 entirely.
5. Go to Keywords↗️. While Page Details indicates the keywords your pages rank for that have lost rank, Keywords shows you which of your tracked keywords your pages have lost significant ranks, but might not be your most highly-visited pages—even though they are important to your business.
6. Choose a date range during which you saw a drop in traffic.
7. Above the table, select the Keyword Losses view. This will show only the keywords for which your content ranked on page 1 of Google during the first date in your selected time range but no longer appear on page 1 during the second date. 
8. Click the header of the Rank column for the first date. This will sort the keywords that you ranked the highest for. This shows you the keywords that had the biggest losses: you were ranking highly, but now no longer appear on page 1.

What's next?

With the keywords you have identified from both reports, you can optimize the related page content to better address the keywords, and have the best opportunity to gain back your lost traffic:

• You can use Keyword Details to help you understand why your rank may have dropped. Review the top-ranking pages for this keyword. Has your competitions' ranks changed? Now look at the result types that appear in the SERP. Has there been a change in the types Google is showing? Identifying these potential shifts in what Google is valuing with top results can help you decide what kinds of optimizations you can make to your content. 
• Learn how best to optimize your existing content for the topics you.