Why is my website not showing up on Google?

This is the question we hear most often from people who already have a website. The answer is almost never “you need an SEO package”. As a rule it is one of six specific reasons, and the first two take five minutes to check and cost nothing. We will go through them in order, from the most common to the rarest.

1. Is the site in the index at all

The first check takes ten seconds. Type site:yourdomain.hr into Google (whatever your domain actually is, .hr, .com or anything else). If nothing comes back, the site is not in the index and no amount of optimisation will help it until that is sorted out. If you get a list of pages, it is indexed and the problem lies somewhere else.

If you have not set up Google Search Console, do that before anything else. It is free, and it is the only source that tells you what Google really sees: which pages it took, which it refused and why. Without it you are guessing.

2. Are you telling Google to stay out

A surprisingly common cause, especially on sites that launched recently. There are two things to check.

The noindex tag. During the build a site is often closed off to search engines so that unfinished content does not get indexed. Sometimes everyone forgets to remove that at launch. Search the page source for noindex: if it is in there, that is your answer.

The robots.txt file. Open yourdomain.hr/robots.txt. If it says Disallow: /, you have blocked access to the entire site.

Both are fixed in a minute, but Google then needs a little more time to crawl the site again.

3. How old is the site

A new site does not appear straight away, and that is not a fault. Google has to find it, crawl it, judge it and compare it with the sites already ranking for that query. For a branded query (the name of your company) that usually happens fast. For competitive queries along the lines of “website development” it is measured in months, not weeks.

If the site has been live for two weeks and you are expecting the first page for a query a hundred others are fighting over, the problem is not technical but the expectation. Check whether you at least come up for your own name: if you do, everything is working, it simply needs time and content.

4. Does the site have any text about what people search for

This is the most common real cause on sites that are technically sound. Google ranks pages for queries, not companies for trades. If nothing anywhere on your site mentions the thing people are typing, there is nothing to place you by.

A typical example: the site has a home page, an About page, a gallery and a contact page. Nowhere does it say what exactly you do, which towns you work in or which services you offer. To the owner that is obvious, because the owner knows the business. To a search engine it is an empty site.

The fix is not stuffing in keywords. It is a separate page for every service you genuinely offer, written in plain language, with the towns and with examples. That is how we laid out our own service and city pages: a page written for web development in one specific town does a job a general home page never can.

5. Is the site too slow or unusable on a phone

Speed on its own will not throw a good site out of the results, but it is the difference between two otherwise equal ones. On mobile the effect is bigger than people assume, because most local searches come from a phone and often over a weak connection.

Check your site for free with PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is poor, the usual culprits are oversized photographs, too many plugins and a theme that loads everything at once. The repair is often simpler than it sounds and it is worth doing before you invest in anything else. We set out how much of it comes down to an off-the-shelf theme in WordPress or custom code.

6. For local searches, the site is not what decides

If you want to come up for queries like “plumber Split” or “hairdresser Trogir”, the bulk of the work is not done by your website but by your Google Business Profile. The map with three results that appears at the top is filled from profiles, not from websites.

The profile has to be verified, with the correct business category, service area, opening hours and photographs. Reviews are the single strongest signal; without them you will struggle to get into that group of three no matter how good the site is. The site helps by confirming the same things the profile says and by supplying content for the query itself.

What to do this week

In order of effort against effect, for somebody who has a site and is not showing up on Google.

• Check site:yourdomain.hr and set up Search Console
• Look for noindex in the code and read your robots.txt
• Check whether you at least come up for your own company name
• Open or finish your Google Business Profile and ask for the first reviews
• Write a separate page for every service you actually sell
• Measure speed on mobile and deal with the largest photographs

If you have been through all of that and it still is not moving, then it is time for a more serious analysis: the competition, the structure, the content and the links. That is the work we do through SEO optimisation, and if you run a small business, SEO for small businesses is worth reading too. If the site is old and hard to repair, the question becomes redesign or a new website.