· 5 min read
A client asks why traffic to their category pages rose in June. You know the team did something in May, but the details are in a closed ticket, a Slack thread and somebody's memory.
What to record
- The URLs affected
- The type of change: title, content, internal links, redirect, canonical, technical fix, new page, consolidation, schema or migration
- The date it went live, not the date it was planned
- Who did it and what result was expected
- A date to review it
Measure against a baseline
Compare the same number of days before and after, using whole weeks so the weekday mix matches. Look at the rest of the site over the same windows: if everything rose 20%, a 20% rise on your pages is not evidence of much.
Be careful with the wording
"Improvement observed after change" is honest. "Our title rewrite increased traffic by 20%" usually is not, because algorithm updates, seasonality and competitors moved too. Clients trust reports more when they are careful.
Catch the changes nobody told you about
Developers change templates. Comparing crawl snapshots reveals titles, canonicals and robots directives that changed without a ticket. Review them before they end up in a report as your work.