Why did the phones stop ringing?
Check the phone and the contact form before you check Google. When calls stop suddenly, the cause is more often something in the way people reach you than a drop in search position. Those checks take fifteen minutes and cost nothing. Only then look at rankings.
Two completely different things feel identical from behind the desk.
Nobody is finding you. Or people are finding you and cannot reach you.
The second one is faster to check, free to check, and more often the answer. So check it first, before you buy anything or ring an agency.
The fifteen minute check, in order
Do these before you look at a single ranking. Every one is free.
Ring your own number. From a mobile that is not in your contacts, at a normal time of day. Does it ring, does it divert, does it go to a voicemail box nobody has emptied. If you use a tracking number, ring that one too.
Send yourself an enquiry. Fill in your own contact form, on a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Then wait. Does it arrive. Check the spam folder, and check whoever else is supposed to receive it.
Check who was receiving them. Forms often send to one person’s address. If that person has left, changed name, or had a mailbox go over quota, the form still says thank you and the enquiry goes nowhere.
Look at your Google Business Profile. Sign in and read the status, not the listing. Suspended, pending verification, or marked temporarily closed are all things that happen without anybody telling you, and any of them stops the phone overnight.
Open your own website. On a phone, logged out. Does it load, does it look right, is there a cookie banner or a chat widget covering the number.
If any of those was broken, you have your answer. Fix it and give it a fortnight before concluding anything about search.
Then, and only then, look at search
If the intake path is healthy, the next place to look is Google Search Console. One reading matters more than any other.
Compare impressions with clicks over the last three months. Impressions are how often you were shown. Clicks are how often somebody came.
If impressions held steady and clicks fell, you are still being found and something is putting people off. That is usually a changed title, a competitor appearing above you, or an AI summary answering the question before anyone reaches your link.
If impressions fell too, you are being shown less. That is a visibility problem, and it is the slower one to fix.
What the shape of the drop tells you
| What it looks like | Usually |
|---|---|
| Stopped dead on one day | Something broke. A form, a phone line, a profile suspension, a site change |
| Faded over weeks or months | Search position, or a competitor doing more than you |
| Web enquiries fine, calls gone | The phone, the tracking number, or the map listing |
| Calls fine, web enquiries gone | The form, or where the form sends to |
| Down the same weeks as last year | Seasonal. Compare against last year, not against last month |
| Down since you changed the website | The move. Old addresses may not point at their new pages |
Compare against the same weeks last year before you panic. A quiet fortnight in August is not a crisis, and plenty of money gets spent proving that.
What not to do in the first week
Do not buy a monthly package yet. You do not know what is wrong. Anyone selling you a fix before a diagnosis is guessing, and you will be paying for that guess for six months.
Do not replace the website. If the cause turns out to be a form sending to a dead mailbox, a new site fixes nothing and costs thousands.
Do not act on a cold email that arrived the same week. Those are sent to everybody, constantly, and the timing is a coincidence.
When it is worth paying somebody
When the intake path is healthy, the drop is real, it has lasted more than a month, and you cannot see a reason in Search Console. At that point you are past what an afternoon of your own time can answer, and the question is genuinely technical.
Our own method for that is published in full, all eleven checks, in the order we run them, using free tools.
What this page cannot tell you
It tells you where to look first, not what is wrong with your business. Nobody can diagnose that from a distance, and the order here matters more than the list: checking search position first is how people end up paying for months of work while a contact form quietly fails.
Last checked 13 September 2026 · written by Alex Harvey