Originally published 14 December 2014. Rewritten in October 2026 because most of the original advice no longer applied. The original date is kept so nobody mistakes this for new research; the content is current.
Every few weeks a Sydney business owner sends me a site and asks why it does not rank. The answer is almost always one of the same six things. None of them are exotic, and most of them are cheap to fix once you know they are there.
1. The site is slow on a phone
Google measures how your pages load on a mid-range phone on a mobile network, through Core Web Vitals. A page that takes four seconds to show its main content, or jumps around while it loads, is held back no matter how good the words are. The usual culprits are oversized images, a page builder, sliders, and third-party scripts (chat widgets, reCAPTCHA on every page, tracking pixels) that nobody remembers adding. Run your home page through PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is under 80, this is the first thing to fix.
2. Pages that compete with each other
A site with “SEO consultant Sydney”, “SEO expert Sydney” and “SEO specialist Sydney” as three separate pages is asking Google to pick one, and Google usually picks none. The same happens with service pages that each cover the same thing from a slightly different angle, and with blog posts that overlap the service page. One strong page per topic beats five weak ones. Merge, redirect the rest, and point your internal links at the survivor.
3. Nobody is named
Google’s guidance on helpful content asks a simple question: who made this, and why should I trust them? A site with no named person, no photo, no history and no evidence reads as anonymous, and anonymous is not what a search engine wants to recommend for a service that costs money. Put a real person on the about page, on the service pages and on every post. Say what they have done. Do not invent reviews, awards or team members; the spam policies cover fabricated profiles.
4. The Business Profile is unclaimed or stale
For local searches the map pack appears above every website. A business with a tired profile (wrong hours, no photos since 2019, three reviews, no posts) is invisible to most of the people searching for it, however good the website is. Claim it, complete every field, add photos, answer the questions, and build a review habit. It is the highest-return hour in local SEO.
5. Links that were bought
This one has not changed since the original version of this post, except that the penalties are now built into the core algorithm rather than arriving as named updates. Paid links, link networks, directory spam and guest posts on sites that exist only to sell links do not help, and a profile full of them holds the site down. If you inherited one, an audit will show it. The fix is to stop, earn a handful of relevant links, and only use the disavow tool for genuinely toxic patterns.
6. Content written for a machine
Keyword density, “LSI keywords”, 2,000-word minimums, and lately pages generated by AI at scale with a suburb name swapped in. Google has named scaled content abuse in its spam policies and its systems are good at spotting pages that exist to rank rather than to help. Write the page a knowledgeable person would want to read, answer the questions a buyer actually has (what does it cost, how long does it take, who is it for), and let the length be whatever that needs.
What to do about it
Check speed first, because it caps everything. Then look for pages that overlap and merge them. Then put a named human on the site. Then fix the Business Profile. Links and content come after, and they work better once the first four are done. If you want all six checked properly, that is what the audit is for.