Your local rankings dropped: a diagnosis order that works

The instinct when rankings fall is to start fixing things. It is the wrong instinct, because changing four things at once destroys your ability to learn anything from the outcome, and roughly a third of reported drops are not drops at all.

Work in this order instead. Each step is a question with a yes or no answer, and most investigations end within the first three.

Step 1: Is it real?

Before anything else, establish that something actually changed.

• Were you checking from the same place both times? Distance is one of the three named factors, so checking from home rather than the office produces a different answer with nothing having changed.
• Were you logged in one time and not the other? Personalisation shifts results, and private browsing hides history rather than location.
• Are you comparing a rank tracker to a manual check? They will disagree, always, and neither is lying.
• Has your enquiry volume actually fallen? This is the question that matters. A position that moved while the phone kept ringing is not a business problem.

Step 2: What is the date?

If it is real, the single most valuable thing you can establish is when it started, to within a few days. Everything downstream depends on it.

Search Console gives you this for organic results: compare the last month to the one before and look for the day the line bends. For map pack positions, your rank tracker's history does the same job if you have one.

Then write the date on a piece of paper and answer one question: what else happened that week?

Step 3: Did you change something?

This is the cause in the majority of cases we investigate, and it is almost always something nobody connected to search: a category edited during a tidy-up, an address arrangement changed, a phone number swapped for a tracking one. Two edits in the same week and you cannot tell which one did it.

• A website redesign or a platform move. The most common single cause, and the damage is usually redirects rather than design.
• A category change on your listing, which changes which searches you are eligible for.
• An address or hours change, which can put a listing back into review.
• Pages removed or consolidated during a tidy-up.
• A developer adding a staging site to the live domain, or leaving a block in place after launch.
• A new plugin, a new cookie banner, a new chat widget.

Ask everyone who touches the site, including the person who would say they did not change anything. They changed something.

Step 4: Is the listing still normal?

1. 01Open your Business Profile and check it is still verified and not suspended. A suspension is quiet and the notification is easy to miss.
2. 02Check the name, address, category and hours are what you set. Google edits listings against other information and does not ask first.
3. 03Search for a duplicate of yourself, especially at an old address. A merge or a new duplicate splits everything.
4. 04Check your reviews are all still there. A batch removal takes a rating down and the profile with it, and a stalled review flow shows up as a slow slide rather than a drop.

Step 5: Is it you or is it everyone?

Look at who is above you now. If the same three businesses are there and you moved from third to fifth, that is a competitive change: someone did something, or a new entrant arrived. In same-day trades such as tyre shops, where the search is urgent and the shortlist is three names long, that shift is the whole difference between a busy week and a quiet one.

If the whole result looks different, with businesses you have never seen before, that is a broader change rather than a fault of yours. Google publishes ranking update announcements, and checking whether your date lines up with one takes two minutes and saves a fortnight of pointless work.

Step 6: Only now, change something

One thing. The most likely cause from the steps above, on its own, with the date recorded.

Then wait. Listing fixes can move within days; anything involving the site takes weeks. Changing five things simultaneously means that whatever happens next, you will not know which one did it, and you will be in the same position the next time this happens.

The point of fixing one thing at a time is not caution. It is that you learn something.

What is usually not the cause

• A competitor reporting you. Reports are only acted on when they identify a real breach, in which case the breach is the cause.
• Negative links pointed at you. Vanishingly rare, and disavowing is almost never the answer.
• A single bad review. It affects conversion far more than position.
• Not posting to your Business Profile for a while.
• Site speed, unless something specific broke, in which case you would see it in the site rather than in the rankings first.

If it turns out you never really ranked and this is the first time you looked properly, the eight causes is the more useful list. And if the drop is only in some suburbs, that is a shape rather than a fall: check the same search from several points across the area you serve before concluding anything, because rankings measured from one spot are a sample of one.