Start with the question
Decide whether you are investigating visibility, traffic, crawling or conversions. Search impressions can rise while clicks fall, and an average position can change because the mix of queries changed. No single indicator explains performance.
Compare suitable periods
- Use equal date ranges and account for weekdays, holidays and seasonality.
- Compare year on year when demand is seasonal.
- Separate branded from non-branded searches.
- Review page and query groups, not only site-wide averages.
- Annotate redesigns, migrations, campaigns and outages.
Investigate rather than react
If clicks fall, check impressions, positions, search-result appearance and landing-page changes. Review Bing Webmaster Tools crawl and indexing reports, server logs and analytics conversions. A ranking change may reflect competitors, altered demand, technical problems or a different results layout.
Prioritise business impact
Focus on pages and queries connected to qualified enquiries or sales. Improving a useful service page can be more valuable than restoring visits to an article that never supported a business outcome.
Trend data works best as an early-warning system. Use it to form a hypothesis, validate that hypothesis with several sources, make a measured improvement and monitor the result.