Before you buy any SEO tool, you already have the most honest data about your own site sitting in Google Search Console — real clicks, impressions, positions, and queries straight from Google. This is a step-by-step content audit you can run in about half an hour, using nothing else.
Why Search Console is the right starting point
Third-party tools estimate. Search Console reports what actually happened: how many people saw you, how many clicked, for which queries, and where you ranked. For finding pages that are slipping, that first-party data beats any estimate — and it is free.
Step 1 — Set up the comparison
A single snapshot tells you nothing about direction. Open Search results, click the date filter, choose Compare, and set the last 3 months against the previous 3 months. Now every number shows a change, not just a value.
Step 2 — Read the four things that matter
Four metrics, and what a change in each is telling you:
- Clicks — actual visits. The bottom line you are protecting.
- Impressions — how often you appeared. Falling impressions mean a visibility or indexing problem, not a copy problem.
- Average position — where you ranked. Slipping position is the classic decay signal.
- CTR — the share of impressions that clicked. A CTR drop with steady position points at the SERP, not your page.
Step 3 — Find the declining pages
Open the Pages tab and sort by the click difference so the biggest losers surface first. These are your audit shortlist — the pages that were carrying traffic and are now handing it back.
Step 4 — Tell real decay from a SERP shift
This is the step most audits skip, and it decides whether your work pays off. For each declining page, read the pattern:
- Clicks down and position down together → real decay. The page lost competitiveness. Worth refreshing.
- Clicks down but position and impressions flat → a SERP shift. An AI Overview or snippet is intercepting the click. Rewriting the body will not bring it back.
- Impressions down → a visibility or indexing issue. Check coverage and internal links before you touch the copy.
Step 5 — Prioritise and act
Export the shortlist and rank it by how many clicks are at stake against how easy the page is to fix. Start where a small refresh protects real traffic. Then decide per page: refresh the fixable, consolidate the thin overlaps, retire the dead. A short, ordered list you actually work through beats a 200-row spreadsheet you never open.
Step 6 — Make it a habit, not a project
The value is in repetition. Run this monthly and you catch decline while pages can still recover; run it once a year and you are mostly reading obituaries. The hard part is not the method — it is remembering to do it every month when you are busy.
That is the part worth automating. Tedrix connects to your Search Console and runs exactly this audit for you every month, then drafts one on-brand refresh per declining page for you to approve — the discipline handled, the judgement still yours. See it on your own site, free.