Two of your pages may be competing for the same Google query. A 10-minute check

One pattern we keep seeing when we look at small sites: a query gets decent impressions, but the site sits on position 15 to 25 and never climbs. Often the reason is not the content or the links. Google is switching between two of the site's own pages for that query, and neither one collects enough signal to rank.

How to check it in Search Console: open Performance, set the last 3 months, click a query you care about, then switch to the Pages tab. If two or more of your URLs show impressions for that one query, they are splitting it. Typical pairs are a blog post and a service page, an old and a new version of the same guide, or a category page and a product page.

What to do: pick one page as the owner of the query (usually the one that converts, not the one with more impressions). Merge the useful parts of the other page into it and 301 the old URL, or keep both but give them clearly different intents and titles. Then point internal links for that phrase only to the owner. Do this before you spend anything on links, because links to a split page get split too.

SEO Radar flags these pairs automatically, but the manual version above works fine on any site. Have you found pages on your own site fighting each other, and did merging them help?