Ever wondered why your website fails to see real customers despite having exceptional visuals and copy? More often than not, it’s because of fundamental mistakes that sabotage website rankings in Google’s search results. That said, these issues aren’t always obvious until website performance starts to stagnate or completely decline. 

This is why paying close attention to these warning signs is essential. Businesses often partner with an expert website SEO company to uncover these signs and take prompt action for dominating search results, and if you’d like to do the same, here are the signs to look out for.

1. Declining SERP Rankings

Seeing your brand name pop up on SERPs (search engine results pages) is one of the easiest wins for your website. Yet, some businesses still struggle with this. One week, their website is at the top of the first SERP, and the next, they’re slipping below their competitors. In most cases, this is because search engines cannot recognize your brand identity, which stems from poor brand signals and SEO implementation. 

This is one of the first and most glaring warning signs that your website SEO needs attention. A small drop from first to fourth on the search results may not seem like much, but across multiple pages and keywords, these drops add up to declining visibility and lost leads.

2. No Rankings Whatsoever

Seeing your pages rank lower than usual is one thing; not seeing them at all is another. Imagine putting in all the effort to create valuable content, but your blogs or landing pages don’t even appear for user queries. 

Unfortunately, this is a common problem and mostly stems from businesses overlooking key SEO tactics. They assume that simply having a page means Google will find and index it. In reality, Google’s crawlers navigate sites with limited resources, and if your content isn’t crawlable, it might as well be nonexistent to them. So, if you don’t see some of your pages ranking at all, prompt action is necessary. You can even use an SEO site checkup tool to uncover issues that are making your pages less indexable, such as orphan pages without internal links, meta tags with accidental no-index, deeply nested web pages, etc.

3. Longer Page Load Times

Slow webpage load times are very annoying, and since Google prioritizes user experience, you’ll automatically lose potential customers. When pages take too long to load, users tend to bounce from them and simply move to any of the other search results. When this happens, especially multiple times, Google decides that your pages aren’t helpful to users. 

Your search rankings automatically drop when the bounce rate is high. Hence, if you see that your site is taking too long to load, you must act fast. You can use online tools to analyze page speeds, or, even better, work with technical SEO professionals to tackle this issue head-on. They can determine what’s causing the slow load times and implement solutions like removing unnecessary characters from your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files.

4. High Ad Spend

Paid advertising is excellent, but solely relying on it cannot deliver consistent search engine visibility. Brands often fall into this costly cycle of PPC (pay-per-click) dependency and end up draining their marketing dollars rapidly, all without establishing a robust organic presence. 

SEO success is a long game, demanding consistent effort. PPC may give you instant visibility, but once you stop spending or lower your budget, that visibility starts to drop almost as quickly as your marketing budget. Hence, if you’ve been seeing your ad spend at an all-time high, consider pivoting to strategically using both PPC and organic SEO. The right SEO teams know how to strike a balance between these two, maximizing online visibility and optimizing marketing spend in the long run.

5. Poor Mobile Usability

Performing smoothly on mobile devices is a must for every website, and Google’s mobile-first indexing uses the mobile version of your site content for ranking. If you notice your site lagging or performing poorly on mobiles, it’s a major warning sign that you need to optimize performance. 

It could be due to intrusive pop-ups, slower load times in poor connection areas, or unreadable font sizes. Regardless, if your site provides a poor mobile experience, you will continue to lose potential users until you optimize it. 

6. Thin Site Content

Many businesses create long-form content because they think short-form content translates to low rankings. That’s not always the case, as hollow content is just as bad. 

Thin content is detrimental to SEO growth. Thin pages aren’t just about low word count but also about the lack of value for the readers. They may say a lot, but not anything meaningful enough, and search engines can spot these from a mile away. Think copied or plagiarized content across multiple pages, long articles filled with jargon, doorway pages with no substance, or completely AI-generated content.

Thin content is a red flag that you cannot ignore, and fixing it isn’t too difficult either. Expert SEO teams use a multi-faceted approach to optimize thin content, from auditing for content quality to deleting or consolidating redundant pages, rewriting for search intent, and fixing duplicate URLs.

7. No LLM Rankings

If you only focus on search engine rankings, you’re leaving key real estate for your competitors to pounce on: AI overviews. Google’s AI overviews appear on top of search results, and when your brand is cited there, you pave the way for users to visit your site without even having to scroll below. 

These overviews, or AI summaries, are led by LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini. They parse the internet for credible and relevant information, citing trusted sources for user queries. If your website is not appearing in LLM answers, you are falling behind competitors who are ranking there. You need comprehensive SEO optimization that focuses on both SERP rankings and AI visibility, leveraging the best of both worlds.

Wrapping Up

Closely monitoring your website is just as important as building it. Even with the most visually attractive content, many websites fail to rank on SERPs consistently, and even more so on LLM results. That said, things change quickly when you start noticing these warning signs and acting on them promptly. Nobody’s saying that your website has to be spot-on from the get-go; rather, the best businesses continuously monitor and optimize their websites to achieve long-term success.