A local plumbing service had zero presence on Google despite years of operation. Our audit revealed a −100 html lang penalty — their site had no html tag at all.
A legacy CMS stripped the html element on export. Every page scored −100 immediately.
One template change restored the html tag. Combined with proper titles and meta descriptions, scores jumped to +24 average.
Page 1 rankings for 5 target keywords within 60 days.