Why your website does not show up on Google, and how to check which reason it is

When a business owner says the website does not come on Google, they usually mean one of four quite different things. Working out which one is your problem takes ten minutes and saves you from buying the wrong solution.

Reason one: it is not indexed at all

Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google, with no space after the colon. The number of results is how many of your pages Google has in its database. If it returns nothing, the site is invisible and nothing else on this list matters yet.

Common causes are a robots file blocking everything, a noindex tag left in place after a redesign, or a site that was never submitted and has no links pointing at it. All three are quick fixes.

Reason two: it is indexed, but there is almost nothing to index

If that search returns six results for a company with three hundred products, you have found your problem. Google can only rank pages that exist. A business with a catalogue in a PDF has, from Google's point of view, a handful of pages of generic text.

This is by far the most common case we see, and it is the one that takes real work to fix. Every product needs a page, with its specification as readable text.

Reason three: it ranks, but not for what you would search

Search your own company name. You almost certainly appear first, and that tells you nothing. Now search the way a buyer would: a material, a grade, a size and a city. If you are absent for those, your pages exist but they do not contain the words buyers use.

The fix is not keyword stuffing. It is writing the specification the way the trade says it, because that is what the buyer types.

Reason four: it ranks, and nobody clicks

Rarer, and worth checking before you spend anything. If the title and description Google shows are Home and Welcome to our website, you can be in position four and still get no traffic, because the two results above you told the buyer what they sell.

Two things that will not fix it

Paying for backlink packages. Bought links are a risk rather than an investment, and the traffic they produce is not from buyers.

Paying for a first page guarantee. Nobody can guarantee a position. What is usually being guaranteed is ranking for your own company name, which you would rank for anyway.

The order to fix them

Indexing first, because nothing else works without it. Then page count, because you cannot rank for a product that has no page. Then the words on those pages. Then titles and descriptions, which take an afternoon and often produce the fastest visible change.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.