The short version
- A drop and a plateau are different problems with different causes. Check which one you have before changing anything.
- Most stalls are competitors improving rather than you getting worse.
- Technical faults, thin pages and stale content are the three most common self inflicted causes.
- Resist the urge to change everything at once. You will never know what worked.
What is covered
Have your rankings stalled, or dropped?
These feel the same in your stomach and need completely different responses. Open Search Console, set the range to the last twelve months, and look at the shape of the line.
A drop is a clear step down on a particular date. That points at something that happened: an algorithm update, a site change, a technical fault, lost links.
A plateau is a line that stopped climbing and went flat. That almost never means something broke. It usually means you stopped adding reasons for Google to rank you higher, while competitors did not.
Write down the date of any step change. Then look at what you did that week. In our experience the cause is on the site about half the time, and that half is usually fixable in days.
The most common cause is somebody else
Search results are a league table, not an exam. You can do nothing wrong and still slide, because two competitors spent the year publishing properly and collecting reviews.
Take your three main terms and look at who now sits above you. Then look at what they have that you do not.
- More pages covering more specific services or areas
- Content written in the last few months rather than years ago
- More reviews, and more recent ones
- Pages that answer the question rather than describing the company
This is the least comfortable finding and the most common one. The good news is that it is also the most fixable, because it is just work rather than a mystery.
Technical faults that quietly cost you
These are the ones that cause a genuine drop, and they are worth ruling out early because they are cheap to fix.
- Pages accidentally set to noindex. Happens constantly after a redesign or a staging site going live.
- Broken redirects after a rebuild. Old URLs returning 404 instead of pointing at the new page throws away everything those pages had earned.
- Slow pages on mobile. Not a direct penalty, but it affects whether people stay, which affects everything else.
- Duplicate pages competing with each other. Two pages about the same service split the signal and neither wins.
- Blocked resources. If Google cannot load your CSS and images it cannot judge the page properly.
Search Console will tell you about most of these for free if you look at the Pages report and read what is excluded and why.
Want to know which of these applies to you?
A free SEO health check covers the technical faults, the page quality and where you sit against the competitors above you, written in plain English with the quick wins first.
Thin and stale content
A page written four years ago that says you are a friendly local company with years of experience is not going to rank, because it does not answer anything.
Go through your main service pages and ask one question of each: if somebody landed here from a search, would they get what they came for without going back? Most pages that have stalled fail that test. They describe the business rather than the service.
The fix is rarely more pages. It is usually better pages. Add what the job actually involves, what it costs or what drives the cost, how long it takes, what happens first, and what the common problems are. That is the material people search for.
Links, and why you probably should not buy any
Links still matter, and the gap between you and a competitor is sometimes simply that they have been mentioned by local press, suppliers, trade bodies and directories and you have not.
What works for local businesses is unglamorous. Supplier and manufacturer listings, trade association pages, local sponsorship, chambers of commerce, genuine local news. All slow, all safe.
What does not work any more, and actively risks the site, is buying packages of links. If an email offers you a hundred links for a flat fee, that is the exact thing Google spent fifteen years learning to detect.
A sensible order to work through
If your rankings stalled, change one thing at a time so you can tell what moved the needle.
- Week one: rule out technical faults in Search Console. Fix anything genuinely broken.
- Week two: audit your main service pages against the question above. Pick the three weakest.
- Weeks three to six: rewrite those three properly rather than tinkering with all of them.
- Ongoing: reviews, and one genuinely useful new page a month.
- Month three: measure. Not before, because nothing settles faster than that.
Rankings respond slowly and unevenly. Three months is the first honest checkpoint, six months is where a steady plan usually shows clearly.
Want it worked through properly?
Our SEO plans cover the audit, the fixes, the content and the reporting, with tracking that shows where you rank across your area rather than one average number.
Sources and further reading
- Google Search Essentials, the baseline requirements and spam policies, Google Search Central
Michael James
Michael heads up NE1 Web Design & SEO in North Shields and has been building websites for more than twenty years.