Feeling stuck, no ranking changes for months on organic or GMB?

Seeking Advice
1

I’ve been working on a site for business setup services in Dubai targeting expats, mainly from India. It’s been 4 months now. At first, there was no ranking at all. After uploading blogs, optimizing pages, and doing basic SEO, I started ranking for a few keywords in the 30-90 range by the second month. But the rankings aren’t stable…

I’m not sure what I’m missing. The GMB profile is fully optimized, but there’s still no movement. I think the only thing lacking is consistent backlink creation. I haven’t had time to work on them daily. Over the last 4 months, I’ve built around 50-100 backlinks, including LC links.

Does anyone else experience this? What could I be doing wrong?

2

If you’ve been building links but aren’t seeing results, it’s probably the quality. Focus on getting better links, not just more.

3

Xavier said:
If you’ve been building links but aren’t seeing results, it’s probably the quality. Focus on getting better links, not just more.

I did competitor analysis and tried to create links like theirs… Do you think paid links could help? Thanks for replying by the way.

4

@pesh
Google won’t know if you paid for a link, but they can easily tell if the site is real or just a link farm.

If the site exists only to sell backlinks, it will eventually get penalized. When that happens, the links lose value.

If you’re depending on those kinds of links, it’s only a matter of time before they stop helping (or worse, hurt your site).

5

@Xavier
I actually report link farms whenever I find them.

Feels kind of satisfying to be honest.

6

Kyson said:
@Xavier
I actually report link farms whenever I find them.

Feels kind of satisfying to be honest.

Same here!

7

@Xavier
Man, I really don’t know what to do now…

8

I think you might be going about visibility the wrong way. If you’re buying links without really checking them, it could hurt you long-term.

Sometimes penalized links get sold cheap, like $5 for 100 backlinks. People buy them thinking more backlinks equals better ranking.

Try testing with a low competition keyword. If you can rank for that and stay there for a few months, you’re probably on the right track. But if it drops fast, the backlinks might be the issue.

It’s better to have a few low DA links from real sites that actually get traffic.

Also, the idea that you need high DA backlinks is kind of misleading.

  1. PageRank (what DA tries to predict) builds over time.
  2. Most backlinks people get come from sites in their own niche, even if they have low DA (like 15).
9

@Charles
Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify – I haven’t bought any links yet. I’m mainly focusing on free links from reputable domains.

I’m using a mix of links – social bookmarks, LC, articles, blogs, etc.

If I decide to go for paid links later, what should I focus on? Right now, I make sure the site is indexed before using any backlink. For paid ones, I guess I’ll need to check for relevance, traffic, and authority.

Is there anything else I should be keeping an eye on? I’m mostly focusing on profile backlinks at the moment.