What the first reading shows, and what it does not

Link strength did not decide these results

On three of the four queries a page with a domain rating of zero outranked pages rated far higher. Position 2 on seo agency dublin, position 1 on local seo dublin and position 4 on seo consultant dublin all went to domains the instrument rated at zero, while pages rated 43, 54, 77 and 91 sat below them.

That is one snapshot, and domain rating is a link-profile estimate rather than a measure of quality. But it is a useful corrective to the most common thing sold in this market, which is links. On this evidence, on these queries, on this date, link strength was not the deciding variable.

The map and the list are different competitions

Three queries returned a map pack. The domains in the pack were only partly the same as the domains in the organic list beneath it, and one query returned a pack with no overlap at all in its top three. A business can hold the map and be missing from the list, or the reverse. The split has its own page because it changes what a business should work on.

Directories and listicles hold real estate

Across the four readings the organic lists include a business directory, a review platform, a services marketplace, a company listing site and at least one comparison article about SEO agencies in Dublin. These are pages about suppliers rather than suppliers themselves, and they occupy slots a supplier might otherwise hold. Any business planning for these queries is competing with that category, not only with other agencies.

One query is a gap

The publisher does not appear anywhere in the local seo dublin reading, in a market where it publishes a whole property on local SEO. That is recorded plainly on the publisher's own position because a measurement property that only prints its owner's good results is a marketing page with a table in it.

What none of this shows

Movement, cause or effect. There is one observation. The second reading in four weeks will produce a difference between two snapshots, and even that will not be a trend. Nothing here should be quoted as evidence that anything is working or failing, and the limits page sets out the rest.