Bad SEO: What It’s Costing You & What to Fix Now

The work is getting done. Your site’s been redesigned or migrated. Publishing is faster. Pages are getting updated. Tickets are closing. The content calendar’s full, and the team’s moving fast.

But if your analytics don’t reflect that momentum—and leads feel more random than reliable—there’s a high probability that bad SEO is quietly undermining everything you’ve built.

When your site throws shade instead of traffic, take the hint. ✅ Pro tip: If leads feel random, check your internal links and CTAs. Alignment beats volume.

If You’re Not Fixing Bad SEO, You’re Feeding It

The signs aren’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s a slow decline in traffic. Other times, it’s competitors outranking you with less content and fewer resources. Or maybe your SEO team is understaffed, leaning on outdated strategies, or focused on the wrong priorities for your business.

The cost of bad SEO: Lost visibility. Lost leads. Lost revenue.

Search Engines Notice What You Don’t Maintain

Google isn’t just reading your content—it’s evaluating how well your site is maintained. If pages go untouched, page speed slows down, or key site elements fall out of sync, it signals to search engines that your site may not be reliable.

There’s no penalty box or flashing warning. What you will see is: fewer qualified visitors, reduced organic search visibility, and competitors overtaking you—not by doing more, but by maintaining better.

Before you assume it’s an algorithm update or a content issue, start with these foundational checks. They’re often the difference between a steady climb in performance and a slow, silent collapse.

15 Things to Check When Traffic Drops or Visibility Slips

1. Compare data before and after any major traffic spike or drop.

Pinpointing when traffic changes happened helps you identify what caused them—like a website migration or redesign, content changes that impact relevancy, or a core algorithm update.

2. Confirm your site ranks for your brand name.

If your business name doesn’t appear in search results, it’s a sign something is fundamentally broken in how your site is being indexed or trusted.

3. Ensure no high-value (money-making) pages are accidentally set to noindex.

Pages marked as “noindex” won’t appear in search results—even if they’re critical to your sales funnel. Learn more about debugging noindex issues.

4. Check that redirects land users—and search engines—on the correct destination page.

Broken or incorrect redirects send people (and Google) to the wrong place, causing confusion and lost opportunities.

5. Make sure your Google Business Profile is accurate (an SEO action applicable to only brick-and-mortar businesses).

An incomplete or outdated profile can prevent local customers from finding you on Google maps, plus you lose out on making conversions right within search results.

6. Verify that each key page includes a self-referencing canonical tag.

Specifying a canonical URL tells search engines which version of a page to rank, helping to avoid duplicate content issues that dilute organic search visibility; in most cases you want the canonical to be self-referencing.

7. Add new pages to your XML sitemap.

If your new pages aren’t listed in your sitemap, Google may not even know they exist.

8. Submit your sitemap to Google via Search Console and confirm it was processed

XML Sitemap submission can help Google discover your content faster. Read this to discover issues with your sitemap.

9. Resubmit recently updated pages to Google (through Search Console) to help accelerate indexing.

When you improve or fix something, you want search engines to index the updated page ASAP to get your content in market.

10. Remove outdated content that no longer reflects your current services.

Irrelevant content can confuse and alienate your audience; it also weakens your site’s overall credibility.

11. Update core pages to address customer objections clearly and directly.

Showing potential customers that you understand their concerns helps increase trust and leads to engagement.

12. Fix broken internal links or replace them with valid destinations.

Broken links frustrate users and prevent search engines from fully crawling your site. It's easier to fix a broken link than to implement a redirect for the 404 page that the broken link causes. Keep this in mind and you'll be inspired to fix broken links early on.

13. Eliminate duplicate or missing page titles, H1 tags, and meta descriptions.

These elements help search engines and humans understand what each page is about—they also help users decide whether to click.

14. Link to pages that already perform well: case studies, FAQs, or service pages with strong conversion rates.

Internal links pointing to high-performing content signal relevance and strengthen authority, in turn this helps users and search engines connect the dots between pages (remember to use good anchor text, too).

15. Reference reputable websites to reinforce your credibility.

Linking to trustworthy external sources aligns your content with authoritative and helpful content—qualities that search engines reward.

Fixing these issues won’t catapult you to the top overnight—but they will stabilize your site, rebuild lost visibility, and make it easier for people and search engines to trust what they find. That’s what gets momentum working in your favor again.

Sometimes the best move isn’t publishing more content—it’s fixing the content that’s already failing. ✅ Pro tip: Audit your existing pages for search intent, internal links, and technical errors before creating something new.

Proof in Practice: One Fix That Changed Everything

These issues I mentioned aren’t theoretical. I’ve seen them—and fixed them—under pressure, with a lot at stake and no margin for error.

When I led SEO for Flip, a video-based learning platform under Microsoft, the team was navigating two high-risk site migrations. First came a full website redesign. Then, just months later, the brand underwent a major transformation: new name, new domain, new product vision.

Migrations like this often result in massive traffic loss. Visibility tanks. Pages vanish from Google. The brand has to fight its way back into search results.

I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I began by conducting a comprehensive content audit and mapping every legacy URL to its new destination—essential for preserving Flipgrid’s hard-earned search equity. I reviewed every page’s technical foundation: redirects, crawl directives, canonicals, sitemap inclusion. That’s when I uncovered a problem—one that hadn’t been flagged by anyone else.

A line of code was preventing search engines from crawling the new site.

Had that gone live, the platform would’ve launched into a black hole—completely invisible to Google.

I escalated the issue, resolved it pre-launch, and ensured that every necessary SEO element was in place. I also rolled out on-page optimizations to help the new brand show up for the right queries—without compromising user experience.

The results? Within 72 hours, Flip’s core pages were ranking for newly targeted keywords. Search visibility stabilized, and the platform retained its presence even as it shifted direction.

While the product has since been folded into Microsoft’s broader education ecosystem, the SEO wins we achieved during its transition were measurable—proof that the right technical decisions, made at the right time, can fundamentally change the outcome of a launch.

When the Landscape Shifts, Will Your Website Hold the Line?

And right now, businesses may need to act just as quickly.

In early April 2025, new U.S. trade tariffs were announced, with sweeping implications across global supply chains. Forward bookings from Europe to the U.S. are already down 25%, and Canadian travel to the U.S. fell by 40% year-over-year in February. While these changes don’t directly target every business, they’ve already begun to disrupt demand patterns, shift buyer behavior, and introduce new uncertainty across travel, e-commerce, and service-based industries (Skift, April 2025).

When pressure rises, your website needs to endure, adapt, and perform.

SEO won’t stop tariffs or market shifts, but it can help ensure you stay visible, findable, and trusted by the people still looking for what you offer.

So here’s the question: If it had to hold the line right now—could it?

Stop guessing and start fixing. ✅ Pro tip: Prioritize all indexing issues first, then tackle content issues.

It’s Your Turn

You’ve seen what bad SEO can cost you—and what smart, timely fixes can deliver.

You don’t need another report.

You need someone who can tell you what’s broken and what to do next.

Use the contact form to tell me what’s going on.

In a few sentences, I’ll know where to look—and I’ll reply with clear, useful next steps based on what I see. No fluff. No pitch. Just perspective you can use.