Why isn't my site ranking? Five checks, in the right order
Most ranking problems come down to one of five things. Check them in this order and you'll usually find yours in under an hour.
When a page doesn't rank, people tend to reach for the exotic explanations first: a penalty, an algorithm update, a competitor doing something shady. In practice the cause is almost always boring, and it's usually one of the first two checks below. Go through them in order and stop when you find a problem.
1. Is the page in Google at all?
Search for site:yourdomain.com/your-page on Google. If nothing comes up, the page isn't indexed, and no amount of writing will make it rank.
The quickest way to see why is Google Search Console. Paste the URL into the inspection bar at the top. It will tell you whether the page is indexed and, if not, the reason. The usual culprits:
- A "noindex" tag left over from when the site was being built. Very common on new WordPress and Webflow sites.
- The page isn't linked from anywhere, so Google never found it.
- Google found it but chose not to index it. This often means it looks too similar to another page, or too thin to be worth keeping.
If it's not indexed, fix that first and request indexing from the same screen.
2. Does the page match what people actually search?
This is where most small business sites fall down. A page titled "Our Services" or "Welcome" isn't about anything a customer types into Google.
Look at the words your customers use, not the words your industry uses. A homeowner searches "roof leak repair", not "roofing remediation solutions". Then search that phrase yourself and look at the first page. If Google shows how-to guides and you have a sales page, or it shows local businesses on a map and you have a blog post, you're trying to rank the wrong kind of page for that search.
The fix: one page per service or question, with the phrase people search in the title, the main heading and the first paragraph.
3. Does it answer better than what's already there?
Open the top three results and be honest. Are they more complete, more specific, easier to read? Do they show prices, photos of real work, answers to the obvious follow-up questions?
You don't need to be longer. You need to be more useful to the person who searched. A local plumber's page with real prices, a photo of the van and "we can be there in 2 hours" often beats a 3,000 word national guide.
4. Do your other pages link to it?
Google uses links between your own pages to understand what matters on your site. A page that is only reachable from the sitemap looks unimportant.
Link to the page from your homepage or main menu if it's a core service, and from two or three related articles using words that describe it ("our boiler repair service", not "click here").
5. If you're a local business: is your Business Profile complete?
For anything with "near me" or a town name in it, the map results usually sit above the regular ones. Those come from your Google Business Profile, not your website. A half-filled profile with three reviews will lose to a complete one with forty, whatever your website looks like. Our Business Profile checklist covers what to fill in.
Still nothing?
If all five check out and the page is new, give it time. New pages on young sites can take weeks to settle. Keep publishing useful pages on related topics, keep linking them together, and check Search Console every week to see which searches you start appearing for. Those early impressions tell you what Google thinks the page is about, and that's your next clue.