When a website doesn't sell, the usual reaction is to think the design is at fault, or that “the sector is very competitive”. But in most of the audits we run, the problem shows up long before the pretty part: Google isn't even indexing the site properly, or is indexing it badly.
This isn't an opinion: 95% of new pages never receive organic traffic from Google, according to the industry's own studies. Most of the time, it isn't because “SEO is very hard”. It's because nobody checked the basics.
The most misleading symptom: the website “works” but doesn't show up
The underlying mistake is usually confusing “my website looks fine in the browser” with “my website is fine for Google”. They're different things. You can have a beautiful design and, at the same time, an architecture Google can barely crawl or understand.
The 5 commonest technical mistakes
- Indexing blocked by mistakeA single forgotten “noindex”, or a robots.txt misconfigured after a migration, and Google simply doesn't put you in the search engine.
- Poor loading speedIf your site takes more than 3 seconds to show content, you lose positions and visits before anyone reads a single word.
- Duplicate or cannibalised contentSeveral pages competing for the same search confuse Google and none of them ends up ranking properly.
- A chaotic internal link structureIf Google can't find a clear path between your pages, it will treat sections that are key to you as “unimportant”.
- Keywords that don't match real search intentWriting for what you think people search for, instead of what your customers actually type.
80% of SEO problems aren't strategy. They're technical maintenance nobody checks.
How to spot them without being technical
You don't need to know how to code to make an honest first check. These three questions already give you a fairly reliable idea of whether you have an underlying technical problem:
- ✓Search Google for “site:yourdomain.com”. If far fewer pages appear than your website actually has, there's an indexing problem.
- ✓Test your website on PageSpeed Insights. If mobile is in the red, you're losing positions to speed.
- ✓Look at Google Search Console (if you don't have it set up, that's the first symptom right there). Google literally tells you its complaints in it.
No hype: no serious provider “guarantees” you position 1 in 30 days. What can be guaranteed is spotting and fixing these technical faults, which are the foundation of everything else.
Where to start fixing it
We always prioritise by impact: first whatever blocks indexing (there's no point optimising content Google can't even see), then speed, and only then content and internal linking. Doing it the other way round is the number one reason so many SEO strategies “don't work” — the strategy isn't at fault, the order is.
In the free audit we check exactly these five points on your real website and tell you, with figures, what's going on. No 40-page reports nobody understands.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't my website appear on Google?
For one of three reasons, in this order: Google hasn't crawled it yet, it has crawled it but you've blocked indexing without realising, or it has it indexed but other pages answer that search better. The first two take minutes to check in Search Console; the third is content work.
How do I check whether Google has my website indexed?
Search Google for “site:yourdomain.com”. If nothing comes up, it isn't indexed. For detail on a specific page, Search Console's URL inspection tool tells you whether it knows the page, when it last crawled it and whether it hit any obstacle.
How long does Google take to index a new website?
From days to weeks, and there's no way to force it. What does speed it up is having a sitemap submitted, internal links leading to every page and some external link pointing at the site. A website with no links pointing to it takes far longer.
Could the robots.txt file be blocking me?
Yes, and it's one of the commonest faults: a line left over from development that stops the whole site being crawled. Leaving WordPress's “discourage search engines” option switched on after launch causes it too.
Is appearing on Google the same as appearing at the top?
No, and confusing the two leads to the wrong diagnosis. Being indexed means Google knows the page; coming out on top means it considers it the best answer. They're two different problems and they're fixed differently.
Want to know whether your website has any of these faults?
We check the indexing, speed and structure of your real website and explain it in plain language, with data.