Why isn’t your website ranking?

Most sites do not fail because of something exotic. They fail on four things, and the same four come up on nearly every scan. None of them need a developer to understand.

1. There is not enough on the page

Thin content is the most common problem we see, and the most consequential. A page with under 300 words has almost nothing for a search engine to rank or an AI assistant to quote, however clean its code is. On one dental practice we crawled, nineteen of twenty pages were under 300 words — the site looked finished, and had almost nothing to say.

The fix is not padding. It is answering the questions a customer would otherwise have to phone you for: what the service involves, who it suits, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens next. Pages that rank for commercial searches usually carry a thousand words or more, because that is roughly what covering a topic honestly takes.

2. Every page says the same thing

Website builders generate a title tag and a description for each page, and most people never change them. The result is a site where a dozen pages carry an identical title, so search engines have no way to tell which one answers which question — and often pick none of them. On one site we crawled, six separate pages were titled “Your blog post”: placeholder text from the template, published and indexed.

Give every page a title that describes only that page, in the words a customer would use. The title is the promise made in search results, so it should match the heading people land on. When those two disagree, the click feels like a bait and switch.

3. Nothing tells machines who you are

Structured data is a small block of code that states plainly what your business is called, where it is, and what it does. Without it, search engines and AI assistants have to infer your identity from your domain name and hope. That guess is exactly where a local business gets confused with a similarly-named company in another country.

This matters more for AI answers than for traditional search. An assistant deciding which business to recommend needs to resolve you to a real entity first. If it cannot, it recommends someone it can. Adding an Organization or LocalBusiness block, and linking the profiles that identify you, is usually an afternoon of work and one of the highest-return changes available.

4. Pages nobody links to

Pages reachable only from your sitemap, and linked from nowhere on the site itself, are treated as an afterthought by search engines — because that is what they look like. We regularly find a third of a site in this state, usually service pages that were added and then never linked from the navigation or from related content.

How to read your score

Both scores run from 0 to 100. Above 85 is excellent and worth protecting; 70 to 85 means solid foundations with a handful of gaps; 50 to 70 means several fundamentals are missing and you are handicapped against better-optimised competitors; below 50 means the page is leaving most of its potential traffic unclaimed.

The two scores answer different questions, and a gap between them is normal. SEO Health asks whether search engines can find, crawl and rank the page. AI Readiness asks whether an answer engine can read it, trust it and quote it. A page can be perfectly indexed and still be impossible to quote, which is the position most sites are in today — and the one that costs the most as people increasingly ask an assistant instead of scrolling results.

Fix in the order the report gives you. It sorts by impact first and effort second, so the top item is the one that moves your score most for the least work. Re-run the scan afterwards to confirm the number actually moved — every audit is saved, so you can see the change rather than take our word for it.