Search recovery

Search recovery is diagnostic work. It establishes what actually caused a drop in organic traffic, distinguishes real losses from reporting artefacts, and produces a phased plan to fix the causes in order of leverage. It is not a monthly SEO package, and it is not content volume.

Most agencies sell you the fix before they have identified the problem. That works out fine when the problem happens to be the thing they sell. It works out badly the rest of the time, and the rest of the time is most of the time.

If your enquiries have thinned out and nobody has shown you the data explaining why, you need a diagnosis rather than a package. In our experience a traffic drop turns out to be one of four things, and each has a different fix. Buying the wrong one is worse than doing nothing, because it costs money and burns months.

A ranking event. Your decline lines up with a documented Google core update rollout window. That is a content and authority problem and it is the slowest of the four to reverse.

An AI visibility problem. Clicks fell while impressions held steady. Your listings are still being served, but users are being answered above the results before they reach you. Fixable, and faster than the first.

A measurement artefact. Nothing actually happened. Changes to how search results are requested and counted have produced apparent collapses in Search Console that reflected nothing at all in real traffic. This is more common than anyone selling recovery services wants to admit.

A site that was never built properly. Slow, uncrawlable, structurally confused, or thin. It was always losing you work; something recent has simply made the cost visible.

Until you know which of those four you have, every proposal you receive is guesswork with an invoice attached. Our post on AI Mode and weak SEO covers the second and fourth causes in more detail.

A day of work and a straight answer. We pull your Search Console and analytics history, date the decline precisely, cross-reference it against documented update windows, check crawlability and AI crawler access, and tell you which of the four causes you are looking at. No obligation and no payment.

You get the finding whether or not you go further. If the answer is that your traffic never actually dropped, you get that too, and we would rather deliver that than sell you something.

A full technical and content audit producing a phased remediation roadmap with each item costed and sequenced by leverage. Indexation and crawl triage, redirect and canonical review, thin and duplicate content mapping, structured data, internal link architecture, keyword and topic clustering, and AI search visibility.

You own the roadmap. It is written so another agency could execute it if you would rather not use us, and we mean that literally rather than as a figure of speech. Deliverables come as documents, not as a dashboard login you lose access to when you stop paying.

The short audit is free. Full diagnostic audits are £1,500 to £2,500 depending on site size and how much of the history is recoverable. Ongoing work runs as a monthly retainer, quoted after the audit rather than before, because quoting remediation before diagnosis is how you end up paying for the wrong work.

Rebuilds are quoted separately. If the audit concludes your site needs replacing rather than repairing, we will say so plainly instead of billing months of optimisation against a foundation that cannot carry it. Our pricing page sets out how we structure the rest of our work.

If you want guaranteed rankings by a fixed date, we are the wrong firm. Nobody can promise that, and anybody who does is either guessing or lying. If you want volume content published at scale with no editorial oversight, we are also the wrong firm, because that is the practice Google's scaled content abuse enforcement exists to demote.

We work best with businesses that had something real and lost it, and want to know why before they spend.

Technical fixes show up in weeks. Content and authority work runs in months. Recovery from a core update ranking event is the slowest and is measured across quarters rather than weeks, because it depends on Google reassessing the site at its own pace.

Anyone offering you a date is guessing. We will give you a sequence and honest expectations for each phase instead. If you would rather talk it through before booking anything, you can talk to us first.