Why we made the clicks go down first
South West Dog Skills runs dog training and agility from two venues near Bristol and Bath, on a Weebly site with real technical limits. Ten weeks in, site-wide clicks were down 9%. We could account for almost all of it, and we had told the client it would happen.
44 of the 55 lost clicks traced to one retired service
duplicate pages retired and redirected
places, Bristol average position
agility click-through rate, up from 4.1%
orphan pages and redirect hops after the rebuild
- ClientSouth West Dog Skills — dog training, agility and residential training across Bristol, Bath and Keynsham, from two venues
- DeliveredSEO audit, cannibalisation and URL consolidation, UK GDPR compliance, technical SEO, schema, conversion tracking, booking and enquiry rebuild, content and ongoing rank tracking
- TimelineMay 2026 to ongoing
- EngagementFixed monthly retainer. No contract
- PlatformWeebly — retained, not replaced
A well-run business with an under-built website
This was not a struggling business. The training is well regarded, the Google Business Profile was in good shape, and agility was ranking on page one before we arrived. What was missing was everything underneath.
- Pages competing with each otherDuplicate and near-duplicate URLs splitting the same search intent across several addresses.
- No canonical tagsAnywhere except the homepage, on a site full of near-duplicates.
- The main courses page blocked from searchSitting in a robots disallow rule while the client believed it was visible.
- No cookie consent and no privacy noticeA live UK GDPR exposure on a site collecting enquiry and booking details.
- No H1 heading on any pageSite-wide, not isolated.
- A broken telephone linkOne wrong digit in the footer
tel:href, so every mobile tap dialled a dead number. - No analytics and no conversion trackingNo way of knowing whether the site produced a single enquiry, let alone which page or search produced it.
- No location copyTwo named venues, and nothing on the site told Google where either of them was.
- No schema markup on service pagesAnd a duplicate business entity where there was any.
- A dormant blogTwo posts, no schedule, and orphaned pages with no route in from anywhere else.
The drop that was not ours to fix
Search Console showed organic clicks falling from the week of 13 April 2026 — five weeks before our engagement began. Impressions barely moved, from 272 a day to 252. Clicks fell 30%. Average position held. Only the click-through rate moved, from 4.11% to 3.09% site-wide, and roughly halving on Bristol terms.
Stable position, stable impressions, collapsed click-through rate is the signature of a change in how Google displays the results — something new occupying the space above the organic listings — not a loss of ranking. We compiled a full evidence log with every figure and the filters needed to reproduce it, so the client could check the dates himself rather than take our word for it.
Fewer pages, each doing a clearer job
The site had grown the way most small business sites do — a page added here, a variant tried there, an old version left live because deleting things feels risky. The result was several sets of URLs competing for the same searches, and Google having to guess which to show.
We crawled the site, mapped every URL against its inbound links and its Search Console history, and built a plan retiring twenty-three pages. Nothing was deleted until the client had signed the plan off by email, because some of those pages were earning clicks and where that traffic should land was his call, not ours.
- Thirteen internal links rewired firstAcross six pages, before a single deletion. Redirect a page while links still point at the old address and every one of them takes an unnecessary hop.
- Nine legacy URLs retiredOld versions of live pages, still indexed, still competing with their replacements.
- Seven booking URLs folded into oneSeven separate addresses for the same action, splitting the signal seven ways.
- Duplicate service pages mergedByte-identical copies of the agility and scentwork pages, plus overlapping puppy and lead-walking pages.
- Two competing methodology pages consolidatedOne carried the impressions, the other the ranking. Folded into a single address.
- A stale page retiredAn example timetable made of images, hypothetical rather than real, redirected to the booking page.
- Homepage variant resolvedThe
/index.htmlduplicate pointed at the root.
Every retired page was screenshotted before deletion. Weebly gives you no undo, and a client is entitled to see what was removed months after the fact.
The merge that needed care
The two Activities pages were the awkward one. The better content sat on the newer URL; the rankings and inbound links sat on the older one. Redirecting old to new would have thrown away the accumulated authority.
So we kept the old URL and moved the better content onto it — the opposite of what page quality alone would suggest.
The final verification run: 30 pages, 897 internal links, no redirect hops, no orphans.
Clicks went down before they went up
Ten weeks after the engagement began, site-wide clicks were down 9.2% against the previous ten weeks. Impressions were up 14.7%. That is not the shape of a report anyone enjoys sending.
It was also almost entirely explainable. Of the 55 clicks lost, 44 traced to the retired scentwork pages — a service the client had discontinued. Those pages were ranking and drawing traffic for something he no longer sold. Every one of those clicks was a person arriving to buy something unavailable.
Foundations first, on the platform they already had
Weebly places a hard ceiling on what is possible technically. A rebuild was out of scope and would have consumed months of budget before producing anything. So we worked within the platform and spent the money where it moves the needle regardless of stack.
- Compliance rebuilt from zeroCookies policy and a full UK GDPR privacy notice covering lawful basis, recipients, retention, international transfers and data subject rights.
- Canonical tags deployedThe site had none beyond the homepage. Self-referencing canonicals added to nineteen priority pages — which on this platform means hand-placing them in each page’s header code, because there is no field for it.
- A page unblocked from searchThe merged Activities page was sitting in a robots disallow rule despite the visible “hide from search engines” setting being off. It was the ranking page for that cluster, and Google had been told not to look at it.
- Schema markup addedService and BreadcrumbList across eight service pages, FAQPage where questions exist, and the duplicate business entity resolved — its identifier collided with the homepage URL, which was the cause. Both venues and their coordinates declared.
- Tracking built from scratchAnalytics, tag manager and Search Console set up from nothing, with conversion events for phone taps, emails, enquiry forms and booking-link clicks — so the client can see which pages and which searches actually produce enquiries, and a monthly dashboard reporting it.
- The booking journey rebuiltThe booking page replaced with filtered routes by service type, and a new enquiry form with a pre-qualifier so the client knows what someone needs before he replies.
- A terminology sweep“Support” replaced with “Training” across every service page. One puppy page had drawn three impressions in three months because nobody searches “puppy support” — fixed through titles and headings rather than renaming the URL, since a slug change on this platform risks 404ing a live page.
- The agility page rebuiltRetitled from a generic “Courses” to Classes & Training near Bristol & Bath, with sections on where classes run, what beginners can expect, and both venues.
- An online course page builtA landing page for the client’s four-week live online course, with the sessions, inclusions, pricing tiers and FAQs all set out — and positioned on the fact that it can be taken from anywhere in the world, which is what makes the international interest in his method worth something commercially.
- The dog fear page repositionedRebuilt as a one-to-one confidence programme for fear of dogs and dog phobia, and positioned on the truth that people already travel to this client from London, Birmingham, Devon and across the UK. A service with national reach was being sold like a local one.
- A niche page rescued from obscurityThe client’s decompression walks page had been found by Google and refused indexing. It was named after his own brand term, which nobody searches. Expanded, and rewritten around the words people actually use — decompression, enrichment, calm walks — while keeping his voice and his name for it.
- The blog revivedTwo existing posts refreshed and cross-linked, a category structure built, and a fortnightly schedule of twelve articles mapped with matching Business Profile posts.
- Rank tracking rebuiltEighty-four tracked keywords cut to twenty-eight, chosen for local pack presence and commercial intent rather than volume.
What we advised against, and what we left alone
Every pound spent on the wrong cluster is a pound that cannot be spent on the right one. Each of these was investigated properly, then set out in writing with the data attached.
- Chasing Bristol head termsThe obvious thing to sell a client in this position. The dedicated Bristol page exists, because the client’s positioning is that quality-seeking owners will travel — but the data is unambiguous: “dog trainer bristol” has produced no clicks in three months from page two, and local results favour proximity. The centre is half an hour outside the city. We built the page he wanted and were clear that the head terms are not where the budget should go.
- New scentwork contentTerms were ranking, but the service was discontinued. Writing new content for something you no longer sell is a well-dressed way of wasting money.
- Fixing the duplicate homepageTwo versions of the homepage rank independently, and the tagged one — the link from the Business Profile — sits at position 3.5 against 18.9 for the plain URL. The canonical tag is there and Google is ignoring it. The tagged version is performing well. Logged as a watch item and left alone, because the risk of disruption outweighs an uncertain gain.
And one we deliberately parked
The client’s specialist methodology has genuine international demand — roughly 3,986 impressions over a sixteen-month window, across the UK, the United States and eighty-plus other countries, with the site holding positions 6 to 8 on the core terms. He teaches online and can serve every one of those countries.
It currently earns about one click a month.
The live results explain why. An AI Overview sits above the organic listings, a discussions block takes more space, and only seven organic results remain on page one — of which the top two belong to the methodology’s own organisation and its official training platform, with a national animal charity holding the explainer slot at three. That is a hard page to break into for an informational query Google is already answering itself.
What has moved
Agility is the strongest non-brand cluster on this site and the focus of the work. Comparing the twenty-eight days to 4 August against the previous twenty-eight:
| Agility cluster | Prior 28 days | Latest 28 days |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks | 17 | 21 |
| Impressions | 414 | 349 |
| Click-through rate | 4.1% | 6.0% |
| Average position | 10.9 | 8.8 |
More clicks from fewer impressions, at a better position — the site is being shown less often but converting the appearances it gets.
On Bristol terms, weighted average position improved from 33.1 to 28.7 since the engagement began, and weekly click-through rate recovered across four consecutive weeks in July, from 0.45% to 2.08% — comparable to pre-April levels at a similar position.
Where the site ranks now
Positions from the 22 July snapshot, verified by independent SERP checking.
| Search term | Position | Local pack |
|---|---|---|
| severe dog behaviour problems south west | 1 | — |
| dog trainer south west england | 1 | — |
| agility for dogs | — | Pack #1 |
| southwest dog training | 2 | Pack #1 |
| dog agility bath | 2 | — |
| dog agility bristol | 4 | — |
| reactive dog training bristol | 4.4 avg | — |
| best residential dog training south west | 5 | Pack #1 |
| dog agility near me | 7 | — |
| dog agility training near me | 7 | Pack #2 |
| dog trainer bath | 11 | — |
| dog training bath | 23 | — |
Search Console reports a blended average across every location, device and personalised result, so its figures for the same terms will differ — and generally look lower.
What is next
Two things carry the remaining work. The “near me” group is the dominant search intent across this site — agility near me, dog training near me, puppy classes near me — and it converts better than any city term. Alongside it, Bath: closer to the centre than Bristol, thinner competition, and already producing position 2 on agility. “Dog training bath” sits at 23 with the largest untapped impression pool on the tracked list, and moving it would lift traffic more than anything else currently available. A full re-check against the baseline log is scheduled for September, three weeks after the rebuilt agility page went live.
Frequently asked
- Should clicks ever go down during SEO work?Sometimes, and it is not automatically a failure. Retiring pages for services you no longer sell, or stripping junk traffic out of your reporting, both reduce the headline number while improving the business underneath. The test is whether your agency warned you first and can account for the difference afterwards.
- What is keyword cannibalisation?Two or more pages on the same site competing for the same search. Google picks one, the signals split, and often neither ranks as well as a single strong page would. It is one of the most common problems on sites that have grown organically over several years.
- Does deleting pages hurt your SEO?Not if the redirects are right. Removing a page that duplicates another and pointing it at the survivor consolidates the signals rather than losing them. What causes damage is deleting with no redirect, or sending everything to the homepage.
- Can you do SEO on a Weebly site?Yes, with limits worth knowing before you start. Redirects need building in a specific order, canonicals go in by hand, and renaming a page can change its URL underneath you. But headings, titles, content, location signals, schema and compliance are all available — and that is where most small business sites are losing.
- What does SEO for dog trainers actually involve?The same foundations as any local service business, plus honesty about geography. Training venues are rarely in the city centre people search for, and pretending otherwise burns budget. Get the venue pages, location signals and schema right first, then target what you can genuinely win.
- Do you only work with dog trainers?No — trades, healthcare, professional services, retail and e-commerce across the UK. The method is the same: fix the foundations, find where the demand genuinely is, and be honest about where it is not. More on how SEO works.
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