Why your website isn’t ranking on Google.

“We’re not on Google” can mean several different things, and each has a different fix. Google describes Search as three stages: crawling, indexing and serving results. It also says that not every page makes it through each stage. Diagnosis follows the same path. Start at the beginning, because a problem at the first stage makes everything after it irrelevant.

First: does Google have the page at all?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com.au. If nothing comes back, the site is not in Google’s index, and no amount of keyword work will help until it is. If some pages come back and the one you care about is missing, the problem is with that page.

Google Search Console tells you why. It is free, and its Page indexing report lists every address Google knows about on your site, along with the reason for each one it did not index. The reasons a small business is most likely to see:

• URL marked ‘noindex’. The page carries an instruction telling search engines to leave it out. Website platforms usually have a setting for this, and it can be switched on while a site is being built and then forgotten.
• URL blocked by robots.txt. A file on the site tells Google’s crawler to stay away from that address.
• Not found (404). The page has moved or been deleted, and nothing was put in place to send visitors to the new address.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google found the same content at more than one address and chose a different one to show.
• Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the page exists and has not crawled it yet.
• Crawled, currently not indexed. Google read the page and left it out for now. It may be indexed later.

If the site is new, give it time before assuming a fault. Google says it can take a week or so to start crawling and indexing a new page or site. It also says you should not expect every address on a site to be indexed. What matters is that the important pages are.

Second: has Google flagged the site?

This is rare, and it takes two minutes to rule out. Search Console has a Manual Actions report and a Security Issues report. A manual action means Google has found the site in breach of its spam policies, and such sites may rank lower or not appear at all. A security issue means Google detected a threat on the site, such as malware or phishing. Either one outranks every other cause on this page and should be fixed first.

Third: does the page match what people search for?

A page can be indexed and still never appear for the searches you care about. Google says relevance is worked out from hundreds of factors, and the plainest of them is whether the page is about the thing that was searched for.

Three mismatches are common on business sites. The first is vocabulary: the page uses the trade’s words and customers use their own. The second is that one page tries to cover every service, so it is not clearly about any of them. The third is purpose. Someone who types “how to fix a leaking tap” wants instructions, and someone who types “plumber Brunswick” wants a phone number. A service page will struggle to appear for the first search, however well it is written.

Search Console helps here too. Its Performance report shows the searches your pages already appear for and where they sit on average. If the list is full of searches you do not care about, the content is telling Google the wrong story.

Fourth: who are you up against?

If the site is indexed, clean and on topic, the usual explanation is that other pages are doing the job better or have been doing it longer. Google makes this point about its own updates with a list of top restaurants: the ones that move down are not necessarily bad, and other places have simply earned a spot. A page that is fine can sit behind ten that are better known or more thorough.

Search for your main terms and read what ranks. Look at how completely those pages answer the question, how specific they are, and whether they come from businesses that are better known than yours. That tells you what you need to match.

Local searches add a limit you cannot work around. Google ranks local results mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching, so a business in Dandenong is at a disadvantage for someone standing in Footscray. What you can improve is relevance, through a complete Business Profile, and prominence, which is how well known the business is.

If you used to rank and then stopped

A sudden drop is a different question. Google’s guide to traffic drops lists the main causes: a ranking update, a technical fault, a security or spam issue, a site move, or a change in what people are searching for. Set the Performance report to 16 months to see whether the same dip happened last year. If the drop followed a rebuild, go back to the first step, because a redesign is when pages most often lose their old addresses or pick up a noindex setting.

Where to go next

Our free website health check loads a page the way a search engine would and reports anything telling search engines to stay away, along with the title, description and sitemap. It covers part of the first step in a few seconds. The later steps need a person to read the pages and the competition, which is the work our SEO service starts with.