"My SEO isn't working" usually means one of a few different underlying problems, and diagnosing which one it is matters more than immediately trying more tactics.
Sign 1: You're not indexed at all
Before worrying about ranking position, confirm your pages are even indexed — search site:yourdomain.com on Google. If pages are missing, check Google Search Console's Coverage report for the specific reason (blocked by robots.txt, a noindex tag, or a crawl error), and double-check your robots.txt isn't accidentally disallowing the section.
Sign 2: You're ranking, but for the wrong keywords
Check Search Console's Performance report for which queries actually bring you impressions. It's common to discover you're ranking well for terms with little commercial or informational relevance to your actual goals, while missing the ones you intended to target — which usually points to a content-targeting mismatch, not a technical failure.
Sign 3: You rank, but nobody clicks
A low click-through rate relative to your ranking position usually means your title and description aren't compelling — or a competitor's is simply better. Rewriting them with a meta tag generator and testing a clearer, more specific version is a fast fix worth trying before assuming a deeper problem.
Sign 4: You get clicks, but no conversions or engagement
This usually isn't an SEO problem at all — it's a landing-page problem. See our landing page audit checklist for what to check once traffic is arriving but not converting.
Sign 5: Everything above looks fine, but rankings still haven't moved
SEO genuinely takes time — meaningful ranking movement for competitive terms often takes months, not weeks, especially for a newer site or domain. Before concluding something's broken, confirm you've given a real change enough time (generally 8–12 weeks) to actually be reflected in rankings.
The bottom line
"Not working" is rarely one single cause — walk through indexing, targeting, click-through and conversion in that order before concluding the whole strategy has failed.
Try it yourself
Put this into practice with our SEO Tools.