You have a website. You paid someone good money to build it. Or maybe you spent your own valuable time painstakingly putting it together. And it looks great. It’s got your services on it, your contact details, lots of lovely product photos. It even has nice fading animation bits.
But when you search for it on Google it doesn’t appear. Not when you search for your services. Not when you search for your products. It’s nowhere. Or at best, it’s skulking away somewhere around page six.
You start asking what you’re doing wrong. Is it your content? Should you have more articles? Should you be stuffing keywords into every sentence?
‘Bob’s high street hairdressers is Bodmin’s most famous high street hairdressers run by Bob. If you want a Bob-style Bodmin hairdressers’ haircut, then look no further than …’ blah blah blah.
In fact, the question you should be asking is this:
‘Does Google even know your website exists?’
And the answer is often a big round ‘No.’
You see, when someone types in a search query, Google doesn’t go out to the live internet and search every page instantaneously. It runs through its own list of web pages and finds ones it thinks are a close match to the search. That list is called its ‘index’ and Google is constantly scouring the internet to check for new pages and see if they should be added to its index. If your pages aren’t in it, they’re not going to appear in searches.
That’s why, when I start working with a new website, the first thing I tend to do is open up Google Search Console. It’s a free tool from Google and it gives you lots of really useful information about how your website is performing in search results and exactly which pages on your site Google has ‘indexed’.
The results are often surprising. It’s not unusual to find that Google has only registered around 10% of a website’s pages.
If you’ve got a large site with thousands of pages, that’s a problem – but at least some commercially valuable pages might be getting through. If you’re a small business owner with 20-page website, it’s more worrying. If only two or three of your pages are indexed, the chances are your products and services aren’t showing up anywhere.
And most business owners have no idea this is happening. They assume they’re just being crowded out by the competition. Or they think the solution is to produce more content. In reality, the problem is more fundamental than that. Google hasn’t even registered that their pages exist.
Now if that’s you, don’t be too disheartened. Whilst public data is heard to come by, in 2020 information surfaced to suggest that Google’s index contained in the region of 400 billion web pages. That sounds like a lot. But when you consider that there are trillions of pages of content out there, you can see that Google is only indexing a fraction of it. So, you’re not alone.
Fine. But you still want to be part of that fraction. So, why isn’t Google listing your pages?
Well, there could be quite a few reasons, but one of the most common blockers I see are broken links. Google explores your website by following links from one page to the next. If it encounters a broken link, it comes to a dead end and often can’t work out how your content is pieced together. So, it can miss out on important parts of your website or just get fed up and go and scan someone else’s instead.
Another frequent issue is down to the sitemap – a page on your website that lists all the URLs that make up the site. It’s a quick reference guide for Google telling it which pages on your site are worth visiting. Unfortunately, many sitemaps are generated automatically, and they end up listing lots of pages that aren’t actually serving a purpose: tag pages that group content in arbitrary ways, automatically generated search URLs, archive pages.
When this happens – and it happens a lot – your own website is basically asking Google to spend time on pages that don’t help your business. Google has limited resources to allocate across billions of websites. If you’re directing Google to pages that have no value, it may well give up before reaching the good stuff.
And then there’s what Google calls ‘crawled, not indexed’. It’s a bit of a cover-all, but it essentially means Google visited the page, had a look, and decided it wasn’t really worth storing. That generally means that Google felt the content was not comprehensive enough or clear enough for it to add the page to its index.
Now don’t read too much into that last point. Google doesn’t act like a literary critic and judge the intellectual vigour of your writing or the tone you take to explain things (we’ll talk about AI content in a later article). But it is capable of scanning text, checking whether it is clearly structured, and assessing whether it gives comprehensive information that is related to a particular topic.
If Google scans your page and isn’t satisfied that it matches those criteria, it may well decide not to add it to its index.
The good thing about Google Search Console is that it helps you to spot these issues clearly. If you haven’t already connected your website to Google Search Console, that’s the one thing I’d encourage you to do today.
It’s free, it’s relatively straightforward to set up, and once it starts collecting data you can open the page indexing report and see exactly which of your pages Google knows about. If your most important pages aren’t in there, then you know why they’re not appearing in search results – and you can start to address the real problem.
In a future column I’ll walk through how to use Search Console in more detail. For now, just get connected. It’s the most important free tool your business probably isn’t using.
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Ben Giddings is an SEO and digital communications consultant based in Madrid. With over 20 years of experience, including senior roles managing digital strategy across the UK Foreign Office’s global network, he now helps English-speaking businesses in Spain and the UK to improve their online visibility and use websites as a tool for business growth. Find out more at www.bengiddings.com.
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