Why did your search traffic drop, and how do you diagnose it?
Open Search Console first and establish which pages and queries lost clicks, then match the date against known Google updates, technical changes you shipped, and seasonality. Most drops are one of four causes: an algorithm update, a technical regression, lost rankings to a better competitor, or demand simply falling.
Diagnosis beats panic, and the order matters. Start in Search Console's performance report: compare the drop period against the prior period, segment by page and by query, and you will usually see immediately whether the loss is sitewide (algorithm or technical) or concentrated in a few pages (competition or demand). Check the coverage and indexing reports for spikes in errors; a botched robots.txt, a noindex that escaped staging, or a broken canonical can silently remove sections from Google. Screaming Frog's crawl finds those regressions in minutes.
Next, timeline matching: did the drop start on a known Google update date (the SEO press tracks these within hours)? Sitewide losses on update days point to quality reassessment, and the recovery path is improving content depth and experience, not tweaking meta tags. No update? Check what you or your developers deployed that week; the correlation is embarrassingly often causal.
Finally, inspect the SERPs you lost: search your dropped queries and look at who ranks now. Sometimes a competitor genuinely built something better; sometimes the result type changed (an AI overview, a video carousel) and clicks evaporated industry-wide. Rank trackers like SE Ranking show exactly when positions moved. Each cause has a different fix, which is why guessing before diagnosing wastes months.