Why isn’t your website ranking?

The cause is almost always one of four things. None of them are exotic, none need a developer to understand, and the same four come up on nearly every site we scan:

• Pages that do not say enough to rank for anything.
• Titles repeated across pages, so search engines cannot tell them apart.
• No structured data, so machines have to guess who you are.
• Pages in your sitemap that nothing on the site links to.

1. There is not enough on the page

Thin content is the most common problem we find, and the most consequential. A page under 300 words gives a search engine almost nothing to rank.

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. Answer the questions a customer would otherwise have to phone you for:

• What the service actually involves.
• Who it suits, and who it does not.
• What it costs, or what decides the cost.
• How long it takes.
• What happens next, once someone gets in touch.

2. Every page says the same thing

Duplicate titles are what happens when nobody edits the template. Website builders generate a title for each page, and most people never change them.

On one site we crawled, six separate pages were titled “Your blog post” — placeholder text, published and indexed. Give every page a title that describes only that page, in the words a customer would use, and make it match the heading they 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 stating what your business is called, where it is, and what it does. Without it, machines infer your identity and hope.

That guess is where a local business gets confused with a similarly-named company in another country. It matters more for AI answers than for traditional search: an assistant deciding which business to recommend has to resolve you to a real entity first, and if it cannot, it recommends one it can. The vocabulary is published openly by schema.org, and Google documents which types it uses in its structured data gallery.

4. Pages nobody links to

An orphan page is one your sitemap lists but nothing on your site links to. Search engines discount them, because that is what they look like: an afterthought.

We regularly find a third of a site in this state — usually service pages that were added once and never linked from the navigation or from related content. Search engines have treated internal links as a ranking signal for two decades; the general practice of search engine optimization covers the practice in full.

How to read your score

Both scores run from 0 to 100, and each answers a different question. SEO Health asks whether search engines can rank the page; AI Readiness asks whether an answer engine can quote it.

Where to start

The order is fixed: impact first, effort second. Your report sorts itself that way, so the top item moves your score most for the least work.

1. Clear anything that blocks indexing — a stray noindex outranks every other problem.
2. Give each page its own title, matching the heading a visitor lands on.
3. Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data, once, site-wide.
4. Expand the thinnest pages that are meant to win search traffic.
5. Link the orphans from the navigation or from related content.
6. Re-run the scan to confirm the number actually moved.

Common questions

These are the questions clients ask most about their audit results. Each answer is the same one the report gives, in fewer words.

How many words should a page have to rank?

There is no fixed number, but pages under 300 words rarely compete for commercial searches. Pages that win those searches usually carry 1,000 words or more, because that is roughly what covering a topic honestly takes.

Does every page need structured data?

Every page benefits from it, and the home page needs it most. Structured data states your identity in a form machines read directly, instead of leaving them to infer it from your domain name.

Why do my two scores differ so much?

SEO Health and AI Readiness measure different things. A page can be perfectly indexed by Google and still be impossible for an AI assistant to quote, which is the position most sites are in today.