Why your site isn't ranking yet, and which cause is actually yours
Nearly every ranking problem on a small site comes down to one of six causes. Most people guess wrong about which one is theirs, spend three months on the wrong fix, and conclude SEO is a scam. Here is how to work out which is yours before you spend anything.
· 6 min read
Check you are actually indexed first
There is no point tuning a page Google has never seen. Search for your exact domain in Google. If nothing comes back, or only your homepage does, you have an indexing problem rather than a ranking problem.
The usual culprits are a stray line in robots.txt blocking crawlers, a noindex tag left over from when the site was in development, or a site so new that nothing has crawled it yet. The first two are five-minute fixes once you know they are there. Our guide to robots.txt and sitemaps walks through both.
Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console on a page you care about. It tells you plainly whether the page is indexed and, if not, usually why.
Your site is new and that is the whole answer
This is the most common cause and the least satisfying. A domain registered four months ago competing against sites that have been publishing since 2014 is not going to win quickly, and no amount of on-page tweaking changes that.
New sites do rank. They rank for specific, low-competition terms first, then work outward as they build a track record. Six to twelve months before meaningful traffic is normal for a site starting cold, and anybody promising faster is either lucky or lying.
If your site is under a year old and you are ranking for nothing yet, the honest advice is to keep publishing and stop checking. Chasing a ranking that is waiting on time is the most expensive mistake in this list.
You are aiming at terms far above your weight
Open a private browser window and search the term you want. Look at who is actually on page one. If it is five national brands and a Wikipedia entry, that is your answer.
Nothing is wrong with your page. It is queued behind sites with hundreds of times your authority, and the gap does not close through effort on that one page. The fix is to go longer and more specific until you find a version of the query where the results look like sites your size.
"Accountant" is unwinnable. "Accountant for freelance designers in Leeds" is a page you could rank for this quarter. The second one also converts better, because the person typing it is describing themselves exactly.
The page does not answer the question people asked
Google is fairly good at telling whether a page satisfies the search that led to it. If people click through and immediately go back to the results, that gets noticed over time.
Read your page as though you had just typed the query. Does the first screen answer it, or does it open with three paragraphs about your company history and a mission statement? Most small business pages bury the answer somewhere near the bottom, under material written for the owner rather than the customer.
The fastest improvement most sites can make is moving the answer to the top. Say the thing, then explain it. Everything else can follow.
Nobody links to you
Links from other sites are still one of the strongest signals in search. A site with no links is asking Google to take its word for everything.
You do not need hundreds. A local business can compete on a handful of genuine links from a supplier, a trade body, a local paper, a supported charity. Ten real links beats a thousand bought ones, and bought ones can actively hurt you.
This one takes the longest and is the least fun, which is exactly why most of your competitors have not done it either. Our guide to getting your first links covers the approaches that work without a budget.
Something technical is quietly in the way
Occasionally the cause is mechanical. Pages loading in nine seconds on a phone. A canonical tag pointing every page at the homepage. A sitemap listing URLs that redirect three times before they resolve.
These are less common than the SEO industry implies, but when they are the problem they are absolute. No amount of content work overcomes a page that crawlers cannot finish loading.
Run one crawl-based audit and read the errors, not the warnings. Errors are things that are actively costing you. Warnings are usually opinions. If you want that crawl and the fixes sorted into an order, that is what the tool does, and pricing is coming soon while it is in beta.