Free 12 Months of SEO strategy to help your business grow – no strings attached. Claim it now ⭷
Free 12 Months of SEO strategy to help your business grow – no strings attached. Claim it now ⭷
A manual action, an algorithm hit or a toxic link profile can wipe out months of rankings in a single update. We find the exact cause, fix it at the root, and get you back into Google — and back into the AI answers your buyers now trust.
A real human reviews your Search Console, your traffic drop and your link profile — then tells you honestly what hit you and how we’d fix it.
Join the businesses already growing with us. No spam, ever.
Every Wix site is at a different stage, so we keep it simple — pick the package that fits where you are, and we’ll scope it to your goals on a quick call.
Get the foundation right and start showing up.
Our most-picked program for serious pipeline growth.
Full-stack program to own your category.
Founder, Road to Top 5
Here's the uncomfortable truth I tell every B2B founder: your buyers have already made up their minds before they ever talk to your sales team. They research quietly — on Google, on LinkedIn, and increasingly by asking ChatGPT and Perplexity 'who are the best vendors for X'. If your name isn't in those answers, you're not even in the room.
B2B is different from B2C, and most agencies pretend it isn't. You're not selling to one person on impulse — you're convincing a group of customers over six to twelve months. The CFO wants ROI. The CTO wants security and a clean stack. Procurement wants three quotes and a comparison. The end user just wants it to work. Each of them searches differently, and each needs a page that answers them. That's what real B2B SEO is: not a pile of keywords, but a content engine for the whole buying journey.
And the surface has moved. Six in ten searches now end without a click. Your prospect reads the AI-synthesised answer and shortlists from it. The brands winning B2B in 2026 are the ones the model trusts enough to quote — by name, with attribution. That's not a 2015 backlink playbook. It's entity engineering, schema, comparison content and share-of-answer tracking.
That's exactly why we built Road to Top 5 for B2B. We're newer and hungrier, we ship every week, and we report the only metric your board cares about — pipeline. If your competitors are already being recommended by AI and you're not, that gap compounds every quarter. The cheapest time to fix it was last year. The next cheapest is now.
Recovery isn’t one action — it’s a sequence of diagnosis, clean-up and rebuilding that has to be done in the right order. Here’s the actual work, grouped the way we run it. Pick a track to see what’s inside.
Before we write a word, we figure out who’s searching, what they actually mean, and which searches are closest to a signed deal.
A CFO, a CTO and an end user search for the same product in totally different ways. We list out every person involved in the buy and find the questions each of them types — so no decision-maker is left without a page that speaks to them.
We focus on keywords that show strong commercial intent and connect your content with people who are already looking for a solution.
We look at what your competitors rank for, what they're missing, and where there's real search demand with weak content. Those gaps become your fastest, cheapest wins.
We make sure search engines can properly crawl, understand and index your website.
We identify technical problems that can stop search engines from crawling, understanding or ranking important pages on your website.
We create content that is easy to understand, useful for visitors and designed to support business goals.
Every page has a clear purpose. We combine search intent, useful information and strong messaging to create content that helps visitors take the next step.
We structure your content so answer engines can easily understand your expertise and provide useful answers.
We organise important information around the questions your audience is actually asking.
We improve how your brand and expertise can be understood across modern AI and language-model driven search.
We create a consistent information structure that helps search systems and AI models understand what your business does and why it matters.
We strengthen the structured signals that help search engines understand your business, pages and expertise.
We improve the structure and consistency of important information across your website so search engines can better understand your organisation and content.
Most agencies guess at penalties and ‘clean things up’ hoping something sticks. We run a forensic diagnosis, isolate the real cause, and fix it with a system we built ourselves.
Find, Prioritise, Discover, Plan & Execute — the same repeatable system we use to turn a penalty into a clean, ranking site that stays recovered.
Find the root cause
Prioritise the biggest risks
Discover clean-growth paths
Plan & execute the recovery
A penalty can quietly drop you out of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answers too. We rebuild the trust, entities and citations so you return to both classic and AI search.
clients grown without penalising the websites.
We separate manual actions from algorithmic drops, pinpoint the exact trigger — links, content, technical or spam — and show you the evidence before we touch anything.
We solve the underlying cause, not the symptom. That’s the difference between a site that recovers once and one that keeps relapsing every core update.
The tricky part of a manual action is the documentation. We write clear, honest, evidence-backed reconsideration requests — and you work with seniors and the founder, never a junior guessing.
Find → Prioritise → Discover → Plan & Execute. A vertical, sprint-based flow — each step lights up as you scroll into it.
A 7-day deep audit across technical, content, entity and LLM-citation signals — scoped to your customers. We surface every leak draining demos: thin bottom-funnel pages, missing comparison content, crawl traps in gated resources, weak product schema.
Not every fix moves pipeline. We rank every opportunity by impact × effort × time-to-revenue — so the first sprint targets the bottom-funnel and comparison queries your sales team already knows convert.
Where are competitors invisible inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews for your category? We map the entity gaps, vendor-comparison prompts and RFQ-stage questions your customers are searching — and nobody owns yet.
A 90-day roadmap with weekly shipping — technical fixes, pillar and solution pages, schema, internal linking and digital PR. You see commits, PRs and live changes every Friday, mapped to pipeline. No slidedeck quarters.
Everything a founder asks after a traffic drop or a manual action — answered plainly, in normal language, founder-to-founder.
An SEO penalty is a loss of rankings caused either by a manual action from Google’s team or by an algorithm update judging your site as lower quality.
There are two kinds. A manual action is a human reviewer at Google deciding your site broke a guideline — you’ll see a message in the ‘Manual actions’ section of Google Search Console. An algorithmic ‘penalty’ is quieter: no message, just a sudden drop in traffic when Google rolls out a core, spam or helpful-content update. To identify which one hit you, start with Search Console — check for a manual-action notice, then look at the date your organic traffic fell in Analytics and Search Console and line it up against known Google updates.
A sharp, site-wide drop on a known update date points to an algorithmic hit; a message in Search Console means a manual action. If only certain pages or keywords fell, it may be a targeted issue rather than a whole-site penalty. Getting this diagnosis right is the whole game — the fix for a manual action is completely different from the fix for an algorithmic drop.
Pick a company that diagnoses before it promises — one that can show you real recoveries, explains the cause in plain language, and never guarantees a specific ranking.
Be wary of anyone who quotes you a fix before they’ve even seen your Search Console. A reliable recovery partner starts with a diagnosis, shows you evidence of what went wrong, and gives you a documented plan. Ask for real recovery case studies with before-and-after traffic (not just ranking screenshots), ask whether senior people or juniors will do the work, and ask how they handle disavows and reconsideration requests.
Run from anyone ‘guaranteeing’ you’ll be back in a week or promising a #1 spot — no honest agency can promise Google’s decision. At Road to Top 5 you talk to seniors and the founder, you get the diagnosis and evidence up front, and we tell you honestly if your case is straightforward or difficult before you commit.
Recovering from a manual action follows a clear sequence: confirm it, fix the root cause completely, document everything, then file a reconsideration request.
First, open Google Search Console and read the manual action notice — it tells you the type (for example, unnatural links or thin content) and whether it’s site-wide or partial. Second, fix the actual cause thoroughly, not partially: for unnatural links that means auditing your backlinks, getting the worst ones removed at source, and disavowing the rest; for thin or spammy content it means improving, consolidating or removing the offending pages. Third, document every step — the links you contacted, the removals, the disavow file, the content changes — because Google’s reviewers want proof.
Fourth, submit a reconsideration request that honestly describes the problem, exactly what you did to fix it, and the evidence behind it. Then you wait for the review, which can take days to a few weeks. If it’s rejected, it almost always means the clean-up didn’t go deep enough — you close the gaps and resubmit. Done properly, most manual actions can be lifted; done in a rush, they bounce back rejected.
It depends on the type: manual actions can lift in a few weeks once the reconsideration is approved, while algorithmic recoveries often take one or more update cycles — typically two to six months.
For a manual action, the timeline is diagnosis and clean-up (usually two to four weeks depending on how many links or pages are involved), then the reconsideration review, which Google typically answers within a few days to a couple of weeks. So a straightforward manual action can be resolved inside four to six weeks. Algorithmic drops work differently — there’s no reconsideration request to approve. You fix the underlying quality, link or technical issue, and then you have to wait for Google to re-crawl, re-assess, and often for the next relevant update to run before you see the recovery.
That’s why algorithmic recovery commonly takes two to six months, sometimes longer for severe cases. Anyone promising a guaranteed overnight recovery is not being honest with you. Expert help doesn’t skip these timelines — but it makes sure you fix the right thing the first time, so you’re not wasting whole update cycles on the wrong cure.
You submit a reconsideration request from the Manual Actions report in Google Search Console — but only after you’ve genuinely fixed the issue and gathered your evidence.
The button lives inside Search Console, under ‘Security & Manual Actions’ → ‘Manual actions’. Next to the listed action you’ll see a ‘Request review’ option. Before you click it, make sure the underlying problem is fully resolved — a request sent before the clean-up is done will simply be rejected and cost you weeks. When you write the request, be honest and specific: name the issue Google flagged, explain exactly what you changed to fix it, and include evidence such as a link to your disavow file, records of your removal outreach, and a summary of content or technical changes.
Keep it clear and free of excuses — you’re making the reviewer’s job easy. After you submit, you’ll get a confirmation and then a decision, usually within a few days to a couple of weeks. If it’s lifted, the manual action disappears from the report; if it’s rejected, Google often hints at what’s still wrong, and you refine and resubmit. We handle this entire process for clients — writing the request, assembling the evidence, and managing any back-and-forth until it’s approved.
Yes — a good recovery service first removes what’s holding you down, and then rebuilds rankings the clean way, so many sites end up higher than before the penalty.
Recovery happens in two phases, and both improve your rankings. The first phase lifts the penalty by removing the drag — toxic links, thin content, technical spam — which alone can restore a large chunk of lost traffic almost immediately once Google re-assesses. The second phase is where the real gains come: with the site clean and trusted again, we rebuild authority with genuinely earned links, useful content and strong entity signals, which pushes you past your old position.
Because we fix the root cause rather than patching symptoms, those gains tend to hold through future updates instead of collapsing again. It’s worth being clear about one thing, though: no service can guarantee a specific ranking — Google’s algorithm and reviewers make that call. What a good recovery service can do is remove the reasons you’re being suppressed and give you the strongest, cleanest possible foundation to climb from.
They combine data forensics with hands-on clean-up: diagnosing the exact cause from Search Console and analytics, then fixing links, content and technical issues at the root.
Identification starts with the data. We check Google Search Console for manual actions, overlay your traffic drop on the timeline of Google’s confirmed updates, and analyse which pages and queries lost visibility — that tells us whether it’s a manual, algorithmic or technical problem and what triggered it. Then we drill in: a full backlink audit grades every link for risk, a content review flags thin, duplicate or unhelpful pages, and a technical crawl looks for hacked content, cloaking, sneaky redirects or bad structured data. Fixing follows the diagnosis.
Link penalties get removal outreach plus a careful disavow; content penalties get pages improved, merged or pruned and trust signals rebuilt; technical penalties get the spam or hack cleaned and the site hardened. For manual actions we then document everything and file a reconsideration request. The key is order and evidence — fix the real cause, prove it, and confirm the recovery holds, rather than guessing and hoping. That discipline is exactly what separates a lasting recovery from one that relapses on the next update.