Why is my website not showing up on Google?

Of all the questions we get from people who already have a website, this is the one we hear most. The answer is almost never “you need an SEO package”. It's usually one of six very specific reasons, and the first two take five minutes to check and cost nothing. Let's go through them in order, from the most common to the rarer ones.

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 isn't in the index. Until that's sorted, no amount of optimisation will help it. If you get a list of pages, it's indexed, so the problem lies somewhere else.

If you haven't set up Google Search Console yet, do that before anything else. It's free, and it's the only thing that shows you what Google really sees. Which pages it took, which it turned down and why. Without it you're just guessing.

2. Are you telling Google to stay out

This one is surprisingly common, especially on sites that have only just gone live. Check two things.

The noindex tag. While a site is being built, it's often closed off to search engines so that unfinished content doesn't get indexed. Sometimes nobody remembers to open it up again at launch. Search the page source for noindex. If you find it, that's your answer.

The robots.txt file. Open yourdomain.hr/robots.txt. If it says Disallow: /, you've blocked search engines from the entire site.

Both take a minute to fix. Google then needs a little more time to crawl the site again.

3. How old is the site

A new site doesn't show up straight away, and that isn't a fault. Google has to find it, crawl it, judge it and compare it with the sites already ranking for that query. When someone searches for your company name, that usually happens fast. For competitive queries like “website development”, count in months, not weeks.

Say the site went live two weeks ago and you're expecting the first page of Google for a query a hundred others are fighting over. There's no technical problem there, the expectations are just a little early. Check whether you at least come up for your own name. If you do, everything is working as it should, it simply needs time and content.

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

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

A typical case looks like this. The site has a home page, an About page, a gallery and a contact page, and nowhere does it say what exactly you do, which towns you work in or which services you offer. To the owner all of that is obvious, because they know the business. To a search engine it's an empty site.

The fix is a separate page for every service you genuinely offer, written in plain language, with the towns and with examples. Stuffing in keywords won't help here. That's how we laid out our own service and city pages too, and 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 won't knock a good site out of the results. But when two sites are otherwise equal, speed is what separates them. On a phone the effect is bigger than people assume, because most local searches come from a phone, 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 fix is often simpler than it sounds, and it's worth doing before you invest in anything else. How much of that comes down to an off-the-shelf theme, we set out in WordPress or custom code.

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

Say you want to come up when someone types “plumber Split” or “hairdresser Trogir”. Here the bulk of the work is done 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 and have the right business category, service area, opening hours and photographs. Reviews are the single strongest signal. Without them you'll struggle to get into that group of three, however good the site is. The site helps by confirming what the profile says and by supplying content for the query itself.

What to do this week

If you have a site and it isn't showing up on Google, this is the order we'd go in. We sorted it by how much effort each step takes and how much it gives back.

• 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've been through all of that and nothing has moved, it's time for a more serious analysis. That means looking at the competition, the structure, the content and the links. We do that through SEO optimisation, and if you run a small business, SEO for small businesses is worth reading too. And if the site is old and hard to repair, the real question may be redesign or a new website.