Thirty years of instinct, all of it wrong

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

— What a glass wall taught me about doing everything right

— Why your rankings can hold while your enquiries fall

— One thing worth doing before Friday

I played padel for the first time recently.

For anyone who hasn't come across it: imagine a slightly smaller tennis court, surrounded by glass walls. Somewhere between tennis and squash.

I played a bit of squash about thirty years ago, to a genuinely poor standard, and I've barely picked up a racket since. So I went in with roughly no expectations and a very old set of instincts.

Here's what caught me out.

The ball comes off the back wall, and it's still live. You're supposed to let it hit the glass and then play it.

Except thirty years of squash muscle memory says get to the ball before the wall. So I kept lunging at balls I should have let go past me, and playing them badly, when if I'd just stood still for half a second I'd have had an easy shot.

I wasn't playing badly.

I was playing squash, quite reasonably, on a court where squash doesn't work.

And it took me most of an hour to stop doing it, because the instinct was the right instinct — for a game I wasn't playing any more.

Which is more or less what's happening to search right now.

A lot of businesses are doing exactly what worked for the last decade, doing it competently, and quietly getting worse results for it. Not because they've slipped. Because the court changed shape.

This one comes up more and more, and it's a horrible one to be on the receiving end of.

Nothing's broken. You're still ranking where you always did. The reports look the same as last year. And yet there are fewer enquiries, and nobody can tell you why.

Here's what's happening.

Google increasingly answers the question at the top of the page. So does ChatGPT. So does every AI tool your customers are now using without mentioning it to anyone.

Which means someone can search, find your answer, read it, and never visit your website. You were there. You were useful. You just weren't visited.

Your position didn't change. What a position is worth did.

If you want to see it for yourself, open Google Search Console and put the last twelve months side by side. The pattern I keep finding is impressions holding steady or going up, and clicks quietly sliding. Same visibility, fewer visits.

Nobody got worse at their job. The game changed underneath them.

The dangerous problems aren't the ones where something breaks.

They're the ones where you keep doing the right thing, competently, and it stops producing what it used to. Because there's no alarm. Nothing goes wrong. The reports still look fine.

A strategy doesn't fail loudly. It just stops working.

The businesses that get caught by this aren't lazy. Usually the opposite — they're the ones who found something that worked and stuck to it, which is normally exactly the right thing to do.

The only defence is checking the number that matters rather than the number you're used to. Rankings were a good proxy for enquiries for about twenty years. They're becoming a worse one every month.

Enquiries were always the real number. Now it's the only one.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

Open Google Search Console. If you've never used it, it's free, and whoever built your site probably set it up.

Under “Performance” (left-hand side menu)

Set the date range to the last 6 months, then select the tab "Compare” and choose last 6-months.

Look at two lines: impressions and clicks.

If impressions are flat or up and clicks are down, that's the pattern. Your visibility is holding, and your visits aren't. It's not a ranking problem, and more SEO of the kind you were already doing won't fix it.

If both are down, that's a different problem and a more familiar one.

Either way, you'll know which conversation you're actually having.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Score your website in 2 minutes. We built it for trades, but it works for any service business that relies on enquiries. https://bamsh.co.uk/website-score

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from. https://youtu.be/QXCk1NYG-Kc

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities. https://bamsh.co.uk/15-min

This week's prompt: put your own Search Console data through an AI and get a plain-English list of what to fix first.

Getting the file: