Why Your SEO is not Working

SEO not working is the most common reason people call us. Usually it has been running for six months or more, the invoices have kept coming, and the phone is no busier than before.

The good news is that the cause is nearly always one of a handful of things. Below are the seven we see most, how to check for each one, and what fixing it looks like.

1. It has not been given long enough (or it has been given far too long)

New SEO work typically takes three to six months to show in rankings, and longer for competitive terms. Google has to recrawl the site, weigh the changes and settle. If you are two months in, it is too early to judge.

Twelve months in with nothing to show is different. That is not patience, that is money leaving the building. At that point, stop and audit.

The practical rule: set a review point at month four. Expect movement in impressions and long-tail rankings by then, even if the lead numbers are not there yet. No movement at all by month six means something below is wrong.

2. You are ranking for the wrong keywords

This is the big one. Plenty of agencies report rankings for terms that nobody searches or that nobody buys from. Being number one for “affordable bespoke joinery solutions South Yorkshire” is not a win if nobody types that.

The reverse happens too. Chasing “joiner” nationally when you only serve Sheffield means competing with directories and national brands for traffic you cannot convert.

Check it: open Search Console, look at the queries bringing clicks, and ask whether a person typing those words wants to buy what you sell. If the answer is mostly no, the keyword strategy needs redoing before anything else.

For most local businesses the fix is a tighter local SEO focus: service plus location terms, a properly set up Google Business Profile, and pages that match how people in your area search.

3. The site has technical problems Google cannot see past

Content and links do nothing if Google cannot crawl, render and index the pages properly. Common faults we find in audits:

• Pages accidentally set to noindex, or blocked in robots.txt
• Slow loading, particularly on mobile
• Duplicate versions of pages (http and https, with and without trailing slashes)
• Broken internal links and redirect chains
• Poor mobile layout that fails Google’s usability checks

Check it: run a page through PageSpeed Insights and look at the Pages report in Search Console for anything listed as excluded. Hundreds of excluded pages on a fifty-page site means something is wrong.

A technical audit is usually a one-off cost that fixes the foundations, and it often has a faster effect than months of content because it removes something actively holding the site back.

4. The content does not answer the search

Google is trying to show the page that best satisfies the person searching. A 300-word service page that says “we offer high quality services at competitive prices” satisfies nobody.

Signs your content is the problem:

• Service pages are thin, generic, or copied between locations with the town name swapped
• Blog posts are written for keywords rather than for readers
• Nothing on the site says who you are, where you are, or why someone should trust you
• Prices, process and timescales are missing

The fix is not more content. It is better content on the pages that matter. Rewrite the five pages that should bring in business before writing another blog post.

5. Nobody is doing the off-site work

Links still matter. If every competitor on page one has links from local press, suppliers, directories and industry sites, and you have none, content alone will not close the gap.

That does not mean buying links. It means listing consistently in relevant directories, asking suppliers and partners for a mention, and producing something worth linking to. It is slow, which is why agencies skip it, and why it works when you do not.

6. Reviews and Google Business Profile are being ignored

For anyone serving a local area, the map results are often worth more than the organic results below them. And the map results run largely on your Google Business Profile: categories, reviews, photos, posts and accurate details.

A profile with four reviews and no photos will lose to one with sixty reviews and weekly updates, regardless of what the website does. Our Google Business Profile checklist runs through what to fix.

7. You do not know what “working” means

This one is uncomfortable but common. If the only report you get is a list of rankings, you cannot tell whether SEO is working, because rankings are not the point. Leads, calls, quote requests and sales are the point.

Before you judge anything, make sure:

• Google Analytics is installed and tracking form submissions and calls
• Search Console is verified and someone is looking at it
• You know roughly how many enquiries came from search last month versus the month before

Without those numbers, both you and your agency are guessing.

How to work out which one applies to you

Do these in order and stop when you find a problem:

1. Search Console, Pages report. Are your important pages indexed? If not, it is technical.
2. Search Console, Queries. Are the clicks from terms that could turn into customers? If not, it is keywords.
3. PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Under 50 on the performance score? Technical.
4. Read your top three service pages as a stranger. Would you enquire? If not, content.
5. Search your main service plus town. Are you in the map pack? If not, Google Business Profile.
6. Ask for the last three months of leads from search. No answer? Measurement.

Most sites fail at step one or two. That is useful, because those are the cheapest to fix.

What to expect from an honest agency

Whoever does your SEO should be able to tell you which of the above they are working on, why, and when you should expect to see it move. They should show you Search Console, not a ranking tool you cannot check yourself.

That is how we run things. Every client has a named consultant, the prices are published from £497 a month plus VAT, and the monthly report leads with enquiries, not positions. If your current SEO is not working and you want a second opinion on why, get in touch and we will look at it with you.