You’ve got a website. You’ve got happy customers. Then you search for the thing you do, in the town you do it in, and the first page is full of everybody else. It’s one of the most common questions we get, and the answer is nearly always one of five things.
Here they are, in the order we check them.
1. Google can’t read your site properly
Before Google can rank a page it has to find it and read it. If something technical is in the way, nothing else you do will matter. Common culprits are a setting left on from when the site was being built that tells search engines to stay away, pages that take an age to load on a phone, and a broken or missing sitemap.
That last one is easy to miss. When we audited Forge Garage, a well-run family garage in Lower Brailes, we found their website platform had set up the sitemap to point at a completely different business. Google was being handed a map of somebody else’s website. The garage hadn’t done anything wrong, and there was no way to spot it from the outside.
2. You haven’t claimed your Google Business Profile
For a local business, the map results often matter more than the website. That box with the map, the opening hours and the reviews comes from your Google Business Profile, which is free. If you haven’t claimed it, or you claimed it years ago and never touched it again, you’re invisible in the place most local customers look first.
Fill in every section. Pick the right categories. Add real photos, keep your hours accurate, and ask happy customers for reviews. When we launched 96 Storage, a brand new business with no online history at all, the profile went live on day one for exactly this reason.
3. Your pages don’t say what you do, or where
Plenty of small business websites open with a line like “Welcome to our website” or “Quality you can trust”. Neither tells Google, or a customer, what you sell. If you’re a plumber in Banbury, the words “plumber” and “Banbury” need to appear in your page titles, your headings and your copy, written the way a customer would say them.
One page trying to cover ten services won’t rank for any of them. Give each main service its own page.
4. Nobody else is vouching for you
Google trusts businesses that other people and other websites talk about. That means reviews, listings in the directories that matter for your trade, and links from local press, suppliers and community sites. A business with a tidy website and no reviews will usually sit below a competitor with a scruffier site and eighty of them.
5. It hasn’t had long enough
If your site is new, or you’ve only just fixed the things above, give it time. Search engines take weeks to pick up changes and months to reward them. Anyone promising page one by Friday is selling you something else.
Three checks you can do today
- Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. If nothing comes back, Google hasn’t indexed your site and you have a technical problem.
- Search for your business name. If there’s no profile box with your details, claim your Google Business Profile.
- Read your homepage heading out loud. If a stranger couldn’t tell what you do and where, rewrite it.
If all three look fine and you’re still nowhere, the cause is probably something you can’t see from the front of the site. That’s what an audit is for. Have a look at how we handle SEO, or drop us an email and we’ll tell you straight whether we can help.
