How do you analyze a traffic drop with no historic Google Analytics data?

[AdamThompson]

A client of mine has a large website with multiple sections (shop, forums, articles, etc.) that apparently had a significant reduction in rankings, traffic, and sales in the past. However, historic Google Analytics data is not available for the site, and I'm having troubles identifying anything concrete about the traffic drop, such as when it happened, what pages/sections it happened to, etc. The shop traffic drives most of the revenue, but it's a small number compared to the forums traffic, so it's hard to pick anything out of top-line trends like SEMrush offers.

What tools or strategies might help in this situation?

[AdamThompson]

Thank you for the input, everyone. In case anyone else has a similar problem, the tool I ended up finding most useful is SpyFu's ranking history tool. We were able to establish what the client couldn't remember – the dates this site did and did not rank for his main keywords.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Adam,

My first question is - how does the client know that they had a drop in rankings/traffic? Where are they getting that information, to give to you? Are they inferring it from having had a loss in sales, or do they know some other way? If they are basing it solely on a drop in sales, it could be that the site has a conversion problem, rather than a traffic/rankings problem.

SEMRush is the tool I would use to identify where they had losses in rankings - have you used their historical data option to see what keywords the site used to rank for, that it doesn't anymore? Even if you don't know the exact date that things went wrong, if the client can give you a date that is definitely before the loss, that should help you compare. The next thing I would check is Search Console and Majestic/Open Site Explorer - are they, or have they been, under any kind of penalty? Is there a pattern of shady backlinks in their link profile?

I would also check for new competitors in the market. Who ranks for their target terms now, and did they rank for them before this change in traffic?

I know this isn't a great answer to your specific question, but if this drop in traffic/rankings happened a while ago (like a year+), I would try to get the client to focus less on "what happened" and more on "what can we do now." Even if you did figure out what happened, if it was long enough ago, putting things back how they were before might not help at all. Instead, I would approach the site as if it were any other SEO project - where are their weaknesses, what could they be doing better, etc. It may not satisfy their need to know what went wrong, but it will get them results.

[ClaytonJ]

Several tools.  Suggest you try semrush and similarweb. Different sets of data but it will give you an idea.  Not close to GA but likely put you on the right track.

Hope that assists.