There is a difference between not ranking well and not being there at all, and it is worth establishing which one you have before doing anything else. Most advice about search assumes the second problem is solved. If it is not, none of it will help.
The quickest test: search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk, with no space after the colon. That asks Google to list only pages it holds from your site. If it returns nothing, you are not being indexed, and everything below the first heading is the wrong thing to work on.
If Google has none of your pages
A site with no pages in the index is almost always being told, by the site itself, not to be there. That instruction usually arrives by accident, and it survives because it is invisible from the outside — the page looks perfectly normal to a visitor.
There are three common sources, and they are worth checking in this order because the first is by far the most frequent.
- A noindex left behind after a redesign
- Sites are usually built behind a noindex instruction so the unfinished version does not appear in search. Removing it is a launch-day step, and it is the launch-day step most often forgotten. In WordPress it is a single tick box under Settings, Reading — and an SEO plugin can set it per-page independently, so it is worth checking both.
- A robots.txt that disallows everything
- A robots.txt containing Disallow: / tells every crawler to read nothing. Same story: correct while building, catastrophic afterwards. It lives at yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and you can read it in a browser.
- The site is genuinely new
- Google has to find a site before it can index it, and for a domain nobody links to that can take days or weeks. If the site launched last week and nothing links to it, there may be nothing wrong at all. Submitting a sitemap in Google Search Console is the fastest way to shorten that.
If some pages are indexed and others are not
This is a more interesting problem, and usually a structural one. Google is finding part of your site and not the rest, which means the missing pages are hard to reach, contradicting each other, or being pointed somewhere else.
Canonical tags are the most common culprit and the least understood. A canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. It is essential on a site where the same content is reachable more than one way — but when it points at the wrong page, Google believes it, and the page you wanted indexed is dropped in favour of the one the tag named.
The other frequent cause is depth. A page nothing links to, or one buried more than four clicks from the home page, reads to a search engine as a page you do not consider important. It is treating your own internal linking as a statement of priority, which is fair, because it is one.
- Pages in the sitemap but blocked in robots.txt
- A direct contradiction: one file says index this, the other says do not look. The block wins. It usually means one of the two files is out of date.
- Pages nothing links to
- If a page only exists in your sitemap, a visitor browsing normally can never reach it. Search engines treat that as a signal about how much the page matters.
- Several pages with the same content
- Google picks one address to show and ignores the rest, and it does not always pick the one you would have chosen.
If you are indexed but nowhere near the first page
Now the ordinary advice applies, and the honest summary of it is shorter than most articles about it: a page ranks when it is the best available answer to the thing somebody searched for, and when enough of the web has linked to you for Google to take you seriously as a source.
The technical parts that are genuinely worth your time are the ones that stop a good page being read properly. A page with no title gives Google nothing to put on the blue clickable line, so it invents one — usually badly. Duplicate titles across pages make them compete with each other rather than each ranking for what it is about. And a page with very little text gives a search engine almost nothing to work with.
The part most small businesses under-invest in is not technical at all. It is having a page that actually answers the question, in enough depth that somebody reading it does not need to go back to the results. A plumber with one page saying 'Plumber in Leeds' will lose to one with a page explaining what a boiler service involves, what it costs, and how long it takes.
What is not worth worrying about
A meta description does not affect ranking. It affects whether somebody clicks your result rather than the one above it, which matters — but it is not a ranking factor and has not been for many years.
Meta keywords do nothing at all. Google has ignored them since 2009 and says so publicly.
Submitting your site to search engines repeatedly does nothing. One sitemap submission in Search Console is enough; there is no queue to join and no benefit to resubmitting.
And paying somebody a monthly fee for 'SEO' that produces no visible change to your website is worth questioning. Real search work changes something you can see — pages, structure, speed, content. If nothing on the site has changed in six months, nothing is being done to it.
Find out where your site stands
Everything described above is something the scanner looks for, with the evidence for each result on your own pages. Free, no account, first findings in about twenty-five seconds.
Scan my siteThe checks behind this guide
- No page is accidentally hidden from searchA noindex instruction tells Google to keep a page out of search results entirely. That is exactly right for a thank-you page or a checkout step, and catastrophic on a page you want found — it is invisible, and no amount of other work will change that until the instruction is removed. It is worth checking because it is usually left behind by accident after a redesign.
- robots.txt is not blocking pages you want foundA page disallowed in robots.txt is a page search engines will not read. That is often deliberate — admin screens, carts, internal search results — but it is worth confirming none of them matter. The serious case is a page that appears in your sitemap and is blocked at the same time: the sitemap says index this, robots.txt says do not look, the block wins, and the contradiction usually means one of the two files is out of date.
- XML sitemap is present and validA sitemap is how you tell Google which pages exist and are worth looking at. Without one, pages that are not well linked internally may never be found at all.
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Every page has a titleThe title is the blue clickable line in a Google result and the text in the browser tab. Without one, Google invents something from the page content — usually badly.
- Pages have enough content to rankA page with very little text gives a search engine almost nothing to work with, so it rarely ranks for anything. This is worth checking rather than assuming: a contact page or a gallery is legitimately short, and padding it out would make it worse for the person reading it.