Why is my website not showing up on Google search results? | Marketing Q&A

Well, first of all, without performing a search myself, it’s impossible to know the exact reason – so send me your business name and I’ll look a bit further.

In general, there are some things that could be causing this:

Crawling blocked

One reader came to me because she had her teenage son create a website for her, and when it was done, it wouldn’t appear in Google search results – at all. Not when you searched the exact business name, and not even when you searched for the URL (without the .com)

This shouldn’t be the case.

I preformed an SEO audit, and immediately saw that Google was blocked in her robots.txt file.

Isn’t this what happens – our kids grew up with tech so they tend to be good at it, we have them undertake a project like this … but when someone has never built a website before, it’s not always the best idea to have them do one for you.  He had seen an article online discussing the robots.txt file, added info it suggested, but in this case he simply didn’t realize it meant he was blocking the site from search engines.

Searching the wrong keywords

Another common way we search for our own website is by using keywords we think it should rank for. If this is the strategy that you’ve taken, it may be that your website simply isn’t ranking for those keywords (or is so far down the list that you’d need to scroll through hundreds of pages of search results).

However, this doesn’t mean that you need to optimize your website for whatever keywords you’ve been searching. They may not actually be the RIGHT keywords for your business or your audience.

You may also not be searching well … try searching how someone in your audience would if they wanted to find the information that you hope they would find.  You can also use tools like Google Trends or Ask the Public to get an idea about how searches are being conducted related to your industry.

You Haven’t Given Google Enough Time

Sometimes it simply comes down to time.

Google can take a couple of months to crawl a website or new content on a website. (It was even worse during the pandemic).

Even if you take the right steps of submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, or manually submitted a new page when it’s published, it could still take months for Google to get around to crawling it.

Something Else is Blocking Your Site

There are also times when something deeper can be preventing your website from showing up on Google.

Here’s a couple scenarios from clients in the past that we were working on fixing this very issue:

Client 1 – Malware

One client came to use because she suspected she had malware of a virus on her website.  And she was correct.  And when this occurs, Google may block your site on search so that the bigger internet audience isn’t exposed.

In her case, we were able to remove all of the malware, update and add security plugins to help prevent it in the future, and then submit the cleaned site to Google again.  

Client 2 – Manual Actions or Security Issues

Sometimes you can see a problem yourself directly in Google Search Console. (And if you haven’t connected this to your site yet, the best time to have done that is before the site is live. The next best time is now.)

There is a menu in the left column of GSC that will show you if Google has taken actions against your site, and usually tell you what it is so that you can clean it up.

Client 3 – Oops, Someone Messed Up

In this case, someone simply made a mistake.

Google Search Console has a section where you can remove a page or your entire site. Most of the time, you should never touch this.

With this client, someone had done a removal, and set it up wrong, where it removed the *entire site* from Google search.

By the time I started working with the client, and a few weeks later got down far enough in the work we were doing to see that this had happened, six months had already gone by.

Six months is a lifetime in the world of search. Even when Google is being it’s slowest, it will have reset the website ranking several times by then.

In this case, what the business owner explained to me was that a page on their new site design wasn’t able to have the URL submitted, so the old site was added to the removal list, so that a new URL would show up.  However, the problem was simply that Google has been taking a couple of months to catch up, and had they just waited, it would have resolved itself organically.

I deleted the removal, but the damage had already been done. Google forgot their old site, which had been experiencing excellent rankings for decades … and upon resubmission, we all realize that their search results must now start over from zero.

These are some of the most common, or most drastic, reasons that your site doesn’t show up on Google search. You’ll want to delve deeper into each one to figure it out.  Or, contact me about our SEO services so that we can do it for you!

Vicky