I stopped guessing which client sites were losing Google rankings

Every few months an agency client would message: "our traffic dropped, what happened?"

Then the investigation begins. GA4, Search Console, manual Google searches. Sometimes it's a Core Web Vitals regression. Sometimes a meta title got wiped during a theme update. Sometimes a competitor just outranked them on a key term.

The problem: by the time you find out, it's already been weeks.

I built SiteBrief (sitebrief.net) to monitor the technical side of client sites — uptime, security headers, Core Web Vitals. But agencies kept asking: "can you also track where we rank on Google for specific keywords?"

So we added keyword rank tracking this week.

Here's how it works:

• You add keywords per site (e.g. "web design London", "shopify agency NYC")

• Every day we check Google and record the position

• If you drop more than 5 spots, you get an alert

• You see a 90-day trend chart per keyword

It's not a replacement for a full SEO tool. But for agencies that just need to know "is my client still ranking for the terms we optimized for last quarter?" — it's enough.

What I found interesting building this: most rank drops we caught in testing weren't algorithm changes. They were caused by the site itself — a plugin update that broke page speed, a CMS migration that changed URL slugs, a noindex accidentally left on a page.

So the keyword tracking pairs with the technical monitoring. You see a drop → you check what changed on the site that week → you find the cause.

If you're managing SEO for multiple clients and have a system for catching rank drops early, I'd love to hear how you do it.