Ranking Issue
SEO Audits
At SEO audits IO we take great pride in the audit work we do to help clients identify when and why ranking issues arise. Weāve dealt with every type of ranking issue & loss as weāve been producing SEO audits for over 20 years.
Trusted By Leading Brands
We've helped hundreds of businesses resolve complex SEO issues and achieve sustainable organic growth.
If you are wondering:
then you have come to the right place.
We charge Ā£150p/h to find out why your website has ranking issues, the cause and how to fix them. We work fast, efficiently & we get exceptional results for clients with over 90% of clients recovering rankings quickly.
Here at SEO Audits IO we provide a full solution for identifying ranking issues, proposing fixes & recommendations and even helping to deliver the SEO until the issue is resolved.
20+
Years producing SEO audits
90%+
Recover rankings quickly
Ā£150
Per hour consulting
7-21
Days for issue analysis
We deal with all types of ranking issues including but not limited to:
Lost rankings due to indexing instability (pages come and go from Googleās index)
Lost rankings due to negative SEO attacks (spam links, hack spam, brand defamation, DMCA takedowns, reputational damage i.e. negative reviews)
Lost rankings due to technical SEO issues (anything from website technical & rendering issues through to canonical issues, HREFLANG issues)
Lost rankings due to cannibalisation (1 or more page competing for the same query/ies)
Lost rankings due to website hack attacks and hack spam
Lost rankings due to Google manual actions, penalties, spam updates or algo hits
Lost rankings due to Google AI overviews or significant SERP shifts
Lost rankings due to site downtime or availability issues (firewall, slow server)
Lost rankings due to failed domain migrations
Lost rankings due to failed CMS migrations
Lost rankings due to site reputation abuse, scaled content abuse, AI content
Lost rankings due to backlink decay / loss of backlinks & domain trust
Lost rankings due to content or age gating, popups, interstitials
Lost rankings due to stagnancy, a lack of investment into SEO, links, fresh content
Lost rankings for almost any reason
Lost clicks due to lost rankings
Lost clicks due to AI & LLM searches i.e. Google AI Mode, AI Overviews
Lost clicks due to AI / GEO / AEO visibility declines
Lost clicks due to Google discover dropout
WHAT WE OFFER
We offer a full ranking issue analysis consultancy and SEO auditing service. You can either book a number of SEO consulting hours for us to investigate SEO/ranking issues, or you can book a full SEO audit which includes analysis, research, recommendations/actionables.
We offer a full:
- Ranking issues auditing consulting service - pay as you go, book hours, we find issues and work with you to resolve
- Ranking issues SEO auditing service - we do a full audit, identify high, medium and lower priority issues, we provide recommendations and can provide support / oversee implementation
- Ranking issues SEO resolution service - we can not only identify where and why ranking issues have occurred, but we can also provide resolution and direct implementation to get things done
We can provide both a hands on service or we can hand hold i.e. support internal SEO team members, coordinate with development team members or dev agencies all the way from analysis to getting fixes implemented.
WHY FIXING RANKING ISSUES IS IMPORTANT
Stating the obvious, ranking issues that are left are more than likely going to either have an immediate highly noticeable effect i.e. sudden lost rankings, lost traffic and subsequently lost sales and revenue, or, they can have an accumulative effect over time where ranking issues get progressively worse until the website loses a majority of its rankings and traffic in organic search.
Compounding ranking issues can take longer to recover from, so, when rankings first start to decline its generally best to get an SEO audit / professional SEO advice as to the course of action to take to mitigate and stop ranking issues from progressing.
It can start with things as simple as rankings dipping slightly, slipping down page #1 where clicks begin to diminish through sudden overnight mass ranking drops where traffic drops significantly almost overnight.
MORE IMMEDIATE RANKING ISSUES:
These are things that tend to have a larger, more noticeable impact in a shorter period of time. Higher, more impactful ranking issues can include:
Manual actions in google search console which can lead to URLS, URL groups or the full domain being suppressed
Negative SEO attacks that cause sudden fluctuations in rankings due to link equity issues or due to the impact of spam weighting against your domain - whilst these are becoming less prevalent - they do still happen
Indexing issues caused by botched domain or CMS migrations - itās typically during migrations that if things go wrong they generally tend to be quite impactful very quickly
DMCA take downs (fake) - this is where negative SEOs/spammy competitors may submit fake DMCA takedown requests against content on your domain leading to sudden suppression
Misconfigured technical SEO such as incorrect robots.txt utilisation, robots.txt non HTTP 200 status, canonical issues, HREFLANG issues
COMPOUNDING RANKING ISSUES
These tend to be ranking issues that compound over time - so whilst they can still have a very detrimental impact on your domain, they generally tend to take longer.
Domain link quality & brand trust issues - if over time your domain doesnāt accrue links of value and your brand doesnāt build trust it can begin to lose momentum across google core updates
Cannibalisation issues - these generally tend to be more isolated but can become more prominent for certain site types i.e. eCom sites with lots of products where there are product variants, or, EN content utilised with HREFLANG across multiple english speaking regions
Poor content engagement - this is where your website content has ranked but aggregated user behaviour demonstrates the content to perhaps not be overly useful or helpful (Googleās helpful content algo) poor engagement over time can lead to a broader demise of content performance across the domain
E-E-A-T / YMYL issues (experience, expertise, authority, trust) and (your money your life) - if your website doesnāt comply or doesnāt exhibit good E-E-A-T / YMYL it may suffer from ranking performance losses over time, poorer quality content or content not written by experts who understand the field may be subject to performance degradation over time
HOW OUR RANKING ISSUES SERVICE WORKS
We typically have an initial chat with yourselves before advising on next steps. The general workflow tends to be:
We have an initial discussion over e-mail / call to ascertain your domain, business and problems
We sign NDAās and then request access to your google search console data
We assess whether you need an SEO audit or SEO consulting (or you can request what you would like from us)
We get you booked in, payment made and your booking is added to our CRM
We ensure we have GA4 + GSC access
We begin your SEO audit
We perform analysis, we generate recommendations & give you a priorities vs impact list
We deliver the SEO consulting work or SEO audit
We have a call to discuss next steps (should you wish to get support after)
WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU
Depending on the level of support you require / our support scope, we typically require:
Generally this covers most support scopes.
Google Search Console access (full permissions)
Google Analytics access
Server logs / CDN information
CMS access (if we are doing fixes) or access to developer/s for implementation
Any summaries of SEO work done, your targets, objectives, struggles
Backstory of any other key things i.e. previous website redesigns, clean ups, CMS or domain changes
CAN WE FIND ANY RANKING ISSUE AND PROVIDE A RESOLUTION?
Yes, weāre very confident in our abilities to uncover and identify why rankings were lost and what needs doing about them. We take a pragmatic and strategic approach to helping you understand PROBLEM / ISSUE + FIX.
We generate a no nonsense high quality manually built audit that highlights issue (via analysis) followed by clear and concise SEO recommendations.
We support clients post audit delivery with implementation and/or signing fixes off and logging them in SEO stack for impact tracking.
Weāre the first SEO audit consultancy in the world that provides a SaaS solution post audit delivery to be able to log annotations of all the things you fix and to track the impact from it. SEO Stack is a rebuild of Google Search Console so it can track all traffic and ranking changes along with annotations - so the platform can look at WORK DONE, IMPACT > CAUSE + EFFECT.
It's how weāve helped businesses globally to recover lost rankings, clicks and ultimately leads and/or revenue.
WHAT ARE THE MOST COMMON RANKING ISSUES WE COME ACROSS?
We audit a lot of websites, every website is different and often the issues with rankings tend to be more complex in that they relate to more than one specific SEO issue, however some sites have very basic oversights that have led to substantial losses - so every scenario is different. In general, the most common ranking issues we counter include (but are not limited to):
These are the most common ranking issues we come across. We often find that a lot of enquiries are from website owners / SEOs / marketers / business owners who have seen rankings and traffic dip / tank after a Google core update.
So for us, diagnostics begins before ranking & traffic loss, we then look at the type of core update and how itās impacted the website (via multi-segment analysis), we then get to the bottom of the quality / weighting issues before we can assess what has actually happened and how to resolve it.
This had become a lot rarer over the years, however, in the last year weāve seen manual actions increasing, especially for sites that are using programmatic SEO / programmatic content generation where Google can often see the content as ālow effortā and apply URL level or domain level demotions.
We do still see spam and link manual actions although they are rarer.
This happens a lot, a majority of it boils down to lots of index bloat (content on a site thatās thin, of no value and available in bulk). Indexing issues typically come down to non-value content, content accessibility issues or spam, or, that the URLS are stagnant, serve no current purpose and are given no weight.
Indexing issues can compound over time - lots of non-indexed pages can lead to a loss of site quality score which can ultimately impact indexed URL performance.
A lot more ranking issues are occurring for companies/businesses who have migrated away from CMS platforms to custom solutions such as NEXTJS / Vercel / Framer etc. The most common issues relate to client side rendering (CSR) where the website acts like a SPA (single page application) shell and where search engines like Google are unable to render the output. Other issues happen for things such as dynamic JS driven menus, button elements that trigger javascript content injection etc. We help identify javascript or custom tech stack SEO issues, we help provide pre-render issues.
This happens fairly often, we often deal with businesses who have seen lost rankings & ranking issues after migration from one CMS to another i.e. Wordpress to Shopify, Magento to Shopify, Wordpress to Webflow etc.
CMS migrations have to be done properly & need to go through rigorous checks before deployment - often by the time businesses find out there are issues its often too late (rankings are lost and a recovery strategy is needed).
Things such as latent indexing issues, poor redirection maps or redirect hops, canonical issues, URL protocol inconsistency, robots.txt misconfigurations & more can lead to ranking issues post migration.
We can audit, identify and fix issues to resolve impact post CMS change.
HOW LONG WILL THE RANKING ISSUE ANALYSIS TAKE?
It really depends on the size of your website, the complexity of the loss and the degree of loss. Typically ranking issue analysis can take 7-21 days, SEO audits for ranking issues typically take between 14-21 days, we can however expedite for clients at an additional cost.
Most SEO issues / ranking issues can generally be resolved relatively quickly - recovery turn-around times vary which we cover below.
HOW LONG WILL RANKING RECOVERY TAKE?
This can vary depending on the underlying cause of your ranking issues. The larger the site, the bigger the decline, the more complex the niche the longer recovery is likely to take, in general:
- Websites impacted by Google core updates can generally expect to see recovery on future core updates when Google reevaluates the website - Google core updates vary on frequency but at least 3-4 core updates happen per year on average
- Websites impacted by Manual Actions can expect to see recovery in around 1-3 months, usually recovery is quite quick once a manual action reconsideration request is successful
- Websites that have lost rankings to technical SEO issues tend to be faster to recover - if the SEO issues are caused by technical SEO issues, they should resolve relatively quickly once the fixes are deployed, again we can expect to start seeing recovery within the first 1-3 months
- Websites that have lost traffic to spam or helpful content infused updates can expect recovery to take longer, in some cases 6-12 months can be a realistic window for full recovery, however the recovery is contingent on whether the issues relate to spammy content / links or poor content engagement over time
MOST websites we work with to fix ranking issues see improvements in the first 3 months, however there are cases where recovery can and does take longer. Itās important to note that not all websites may be able to fully recover - it depends on what is driving the loss. For example large scale click loss because of helpful content updates AND AI Overview click loss are much harder to recover from + because of AI Overviews, it may not be possible to get back to the same level of traffic, however this isnāt true for every site.
WHAT ARE YOU BUYING?
You are generally buying either:
- SEO Consulting hours which can be delivered over Microsoft Teams, SLACK, Whatsapp, Google chat or over a platform of your choice
- Deliverables - typically you will receive analysis e-mails, google slides with analysis, snapshots, insights and recommendations
- Hands on support if required - we can fix SEO issues, provide content, backlinks and SEO implementation
You will receive PDFs/Google slides with clearly defined insights and recommendations with a priority matrix/hierarchy so you know what needs dealing with first.
We also provide clients with access to SEO Stack () which is an SEO SaaS platform that allows clients to see the impact of executed work on top of their Google Search Console data.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?
This depends on your website, size of website, the type of loss and whether you want consulting or a full SEO audit. Typically:
Ā£900 - Ā£1500
Smaller websites tend to do better with 5-10 consulting hours, usually Ā£900 - Ā£1500
Ā£2500 - Ā£5000
Medium websites tend to do better with an SEO audit but consulting remains viable, typically costs range between Ā£2500 - Ā£5000
Ā£5000-Ā£10000
Larger websites tend to do better with a professional behemoth SEO audit, costs typically range between Ā£5000-Ā£10000
However, we can provide ad-hoc SEO consulting from Ā£150 per hour, we can advise on what would be better for your situation if you get in contact with us.
WHY CHOOSE US TO FIX YOUR WEBSITE RANKINGS?
Thereās many reasons to choose SEO Audits IO as your ranking recovery partner, these include:
We have extensive experience helping clients globally in all different niches to recover lost rankings and traffic
20+ years experience in SEO
90%+ client ranking recovery success rate (based on a 12 month period)
Multi-niche experience across finance, healthcare, casino, commercial, travel, eCommerce, service businesses, affiliates & publications
Weāre full service - meaning we can handle as little or as much as youād like us to
Proprietary software, SEO Audits IO is a part of the Assertive group which developed
Get Expert Help With Your Ranking Issues
If you have a ranking issue and what a straight, no nonsense approach to identifying the issue along with a fix - look no further we can help.
We help clients to understand what their issue is and how to fix it, itās also important to highlight that not all click loss is down to an āSEO issueā. We see an increasing number of clients who have seen major click loss due to Google AI Overviews - at which point recovery becomes the focus from a compensation & AI overviews strategy.
Talk To Us About Your Ranking Issue
Tell us what has happened to your rankings and we will advise on whether consulting hours or a full SEO audit is the better route.
