A practical way to tell whether your search spend, your site or your offer is the problem
Say an engineering firm with 30 years of referral work behind it signs a 12-month SEO agreement, gets a tidy monthly report, and hears nothing different from the sales team. Rankings have moved for a few terms, but the phone hasn’t. At that point the easy conclusion is that the agency is no good, and sometimes that’s right. There are several reasons for SEO not working, though, and most of them sit somewhere other than the search work itself. Before you change supplier, separate the work that isn’t being done from the work being done on the wrong thing.
In this article
What people mean by SEO not working
The phrase covers at least three different problems, and they don’t share a fix.
Nothing ranks. Your pages sit well outside the first page for the terms you care about. That’s a question of relevance, site structure or authority, and often all three at once.
Pages rank, but nobody clicks. Impressions climb in Search Console while clicks stay flat. Either the result above you answers the question, or your title and description don’t match what the searcher came for.
People click, and nothing happens. Traffic arrives, reads a page and leaves. That’s a website and offer problem wearing an SEO costume, and no amount of extra traffic fixes it.
Work out which of the three you have before anyone changes tactics. In practice that’s an hour in Google Search Console and your analytics, looking at impressions, clicks and enquiries for the same set of pages over the same period.
Ranking first isn’t the result it used to be
Ahrefs’ global research tracked the effect of AI Overviews on position 1 click-through rate over two years, and found it went from a 34.5% drop in spring 2025 to a 58% drop by the end of 2025. That’s global data from a search tool vendor, and your market may behave differently. But it points at something worth checking in your own Search Console: positions holding while clicks slide.
So two things can be true at once. Your agency can be doing competent work on the terms that matter, and your organic traffic can still fall, because fewer people click anything when the answer appears above the results. If that’s your situation, the question changes from “why aren’t we ranking” to how your business is described in AI answers as well as in the blue links. That’s the ground AI search visibility covers, and it draws on the same content and technical foundations as organic search.
Four checks to run before you blame the agency
Ask what each target keyword is meant to do. Go down the list and name the buyer behind each term and the page it should land on. A page that ranks for a term your buyers never type is a win on a chart and nothing in the bank.
Look at who ranks today, not who you assume you’re up against. The RADAR Digital Index, Redfox’s benchmark of Australian and New Zealand businesses, scored 1,339 Australian professional coaching businesses in Q3 2026 and found a median Semrush Authority Score of 7 out of 100. That’s one industry, and yours may be far tougher. Still, test the assumption that everyone above you is untouchable before you accept it.
Check the tracking before the tactics. Broken measurement is common enough to rule out first: a contact form that stopped sending to the CRM, or GA4 counting every page view as a conversion. If the data is wrong, every argument about performance is guesswork.
Read your own service page as a buyer would. Does it answer price, process, proof and who you’re for? Most pages that rank and don’t convert are missing two of those four.
The usual reasons for SEO not working
When the checks come back clean and the enquiries still aren’t there, the cause is usually upstream of search. The positioning may be vague, so the content has nothing distinctive to say. The traffic may be the wrong audience, drawn by broad informational terms that look impressive in a report. Or enquiries may be arriving and dying in the follow-up, which is a strategy problem rather than an SEO problem and needs a different conversation.
The other common cause is a plan that was never a plan. Alanah put it plainly when we asked her what B2B companies get wrong:
“Set short-term goals, absolutely, but make sure they’re building towards a longer-term plan. Rankings alone aren’t much use if they’re not bringing in relevant enquiries.”
Alanah Fox, Co-Founder and Growth Director
How long should it take before you worry?
Search work compounds, so judging it at six weeks tells you nothing. Judging it at twelve months without interim checkpoints tells you only that you’ve spent the money. Ask for three. At 90 days, the technical fixes done, tracking verified and target terms agreed. At six months, movement in impressions and positions on those terms. At twelve months, enquiries you can trace back.
Context matters here too. Of the 1,339 Australian professional coaching businesses in that same RADAR benchmark with a measurable 12-month trend, 54.2% lost organic search traffic over the year. Again, that’s one industry. But it’s a reminder that in plenty of markets, holding ground is itself work, and flat isn’t automatically failure.
A page that ranks for a term your buyers never type is a win on a chart and nothing in the bank.
Frequently asked questions
Six months is long enough to see movement in impressions and positions, but often not long enough to see enquiries from competitive terms. If none of the leading indicators have moved at all, the plan is the problem.
Yes. Competitors publish, Google changes how results are presented, and site migrations break pages that used to rank. A year of decline after years of growth usually means something changed around you.
Not on rankings alone. Ask what was promised at 90 days and whether it arrived, then ask whether the target terms were ever the right ones.
Yes, because the same content quality and site structure feed both. What’s changed is the click volume behind a top ranking, so judge the work on enquiries you can trace.
What to ask at your next reporting meeting
Open the last three monthly reports and look for one number: enquiries attributed to organic search, and what each one was worth to you. If that number isn’t there, start by fixing the measurement, because everything else in the report is standing in for it. Then ask your agency which of the three problems above they think you have, and listen for whether the answer is specific to your business or a general case for more content. Google publishes its own guidance on what it rewards, and a good supplier can connect their plan to it without hand-waving.
Redfox Digital is a Sydney digital growth agency with more than 20 years behind us. We find where growth gets stuck, and search is one of the places we look.
If your reports look healthy and your pipeline doesn’t, talk it through with us and we’ll go through what those reports are telling you. Book a discovery call.
