Why Search Visibility Drops Even When SEO Is “Being Done”

A short list of quiet failures behind the plateau most teams eventually hit.

DJ

By Dewang Jani

Founder and Principal Engineer, Webometry

Most metadata problems are boring and small and never make it onto a redesign brief. That’s why they’re so common. A partial list of the things we routinely find on otherwise well-run sites:

Title tags that are all the site’s brand name, with no per-page differentiation. Open Graph tags that ship the site logo as the share image on every article. Canonical tags pointing to a version of the URL with a trailing slash on a platform that serves without one. H1s that duplicate the site name instead of describing the page. Alt text that is empty on illustrative images and correct on decorative ones – the reverse of what accessibility guidance recommends.

None of these is a crisis. Together, they’re a slow leak. Fix them, and rankings and click-through rates both quietly move up. It’s the least glamorous work in this discipline and among the highest ROI.

About the author

Dewang Jani

Founder of Webometry. Twelve years spent engineering websites, email systems, and organic growth programmes for operators who care about longevity over launch-day noise.

Published · More from 2025