Now, imagine a Dubai dental practice with a website that has taken months to put together. The practice owner puts it on their Instagram profile, prints it on their flyers, searches for the practice name on Google. Nothing. It's a heartbreaking experience, but it happens far too often. Yet, without the website showing up on Google, there's often just a few errors preventing this from happening that can be easily fixed.
Reasons Why Your Website is Not Showing on Google
There are three simple steps to get you Google listing: locate the page, scan the page, and determine whether the page gets a ranking. If one of the steps goes awry, your site doesn't even show up. Let's take a look at the usual culprits.
Nobody Has Told Google You Exist
New URLs can take one or two weeks to crawl. For example, if there were no links pointing to the page and the page was never sent in a sitemap, Google wouldn't be able to find the page. Submit your sitemap within Google Search Console and have the most crucial pages indexed.
There's a Setting Concealing the Complete Site
Caveat here that a lot of owners overlook - there's one checkbox in WordPress you may never have clicked that would prevent the whole website from appearing to search engines. And one mistake in the robots.txt file can prevent Google from indexing your site.
A Leftover Noindex Tag Blocks Your Pages
Most designers embed this label as part of the build to stop pages not yet complete from being visible. Come launch day, no one ever removes it. So, the first things to look for if your website isn't appearing on Google are your homepage and major service pages.
Your Pages Say Too Little
Google does not have enough of a reason to rank pages with only two lines or those that are re-hashed from another web site, instead create unique pages that solve a genuine question your customer might have, and please include where you are based for example Dubai, Sharjah or Abu Dhabi.
Visitors Wait Too Long on Their Phones
UAE shoppers will mostly browse on their phone. That means a big page that crawls on a 4G signal will lose you visitors and rankings. To improve speed, scale down your images, tidy up any unwanted plugins and test on your phone.
The SEO Foundations Are Missing
Your page titles, meta descriptions, obvious headings and a handful of links from authoritative sites all demonstrate to Google that you take your website seriously. Otherwise, a pretty design will never beat a site that did the homework.
How to Fix a Website Not Showing on Google
Step one, is to search for site:yourdomain.ae and look at the results. If there are no results, your page is not in the Google index and is not showing in search results. Step two, is to go into Google Search Console and look at the indexing report to identify the errors that are preventing your pages from being indexed. If you'd like some professional assistance with this, then we can help with our SEO services.
Each week your site remains hidden, a competitor captures a customer. Give One Hub a call and we will assist you to rectify your website not appearing on Google so the correct audience can discover you.
Quick Answers
When should a new site start showing up in search?
Plan for a timeframe of a few days to a few weeks depending on the speed of the crawl from Google.
What is the fastest way to check my pages in Google?
Enter type site:yourdomain.ae in search bar then it will show nothing its not indexed by Google.
Why are my indexed pages not appearing higher?
Only tells Google your page exists. Still need useful content, good SEO and trust.
Is WordPress hiding my site?
Can I make my whole website invisible to Google Yes, if you check the search visibility checkbox in the Reading section.
Is it worth configuring Google Search Console?
You bet, cause it's free and it lets you know what pages Google did index and which errors are holding you back.