You have a website, perhaps built recently and with care, and when you search for your business name you find it. But as soon as you try what you actually sell (“plumber in Bergamo”, “accountant for freelancers”, “dental practice near me”) there is no trace of it. The most common reaction is to think you need to “do SEO” in some vague sense, which means paying someone to do something. In reality, in most cases the problem has a specific cause, and it is often one of only a few.
The point is that causes should be checked in a certain order. There is no use writing new copy if Google cannot even read your pages, just as there is no use rewriting titles if the site is set up not to be indexed. Here are the five most frequent causes, in the order in which it makes sense to check them, and for each one where to look without being technical.
The five checks, in the right order
1. Your site isn’t indexed (or you blocked it yourself)
First question: does Google know your pages? The quickest check is to type site:yourdomain.com into the search bar (no spaces, with your real address). If results appear, the site is at least partly indexed. If nothing appears, or only the home page does, you have already found the first clue.
There are two very common blocks. The first is a setting left over from the development phase: WordPress sites have a box called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” (under Settings, Reading section), which whoever builds the site switches on while working and sometimes forgets to switch off. The second is a rule in the robots.txt file or a “noindex” instruction on individual pages. If you have an SEO plugin, the page usually has a visible option to set it.
For a definite answer you need Google Search Console, Google’s free tool for website owners. In the “Page indexing” section you can see how many pages are indexed and, for those that are not, the reason Google gives. With “URL Inspection” you can also paste the address of a page and find out whether Google sees it and can show it.
2. There is no page for what people search for
Google does not show “a website”, it shows a page that answers a search. If your site has a home page that says “We offer tailor-made solutions” and a “Services” page with a list of items in a few lines, there is no page that answers “air conditioning installation in Brescia” or “advice on the flat-rate tax regime for freelancers”.
The check is simple: write down on a sheet of paper the ten searches you would like to be found for and, for each one, note which page of your site answers it. If the answer is “the home page” for all of them, the problem is here. The solution is one page for each main service, with text that explains concretely what you do, for whom, where and how people work with you.
3. Titles and descriptions are missing, repeated or vague
The title is the heading that appears in the browser tab and, in blue, in the Google result. To see it, just hover over the tab or right-click the page and choose “View page source”: look for the line that starts with <title>. If you read “Home” or just the company name on every page, Google has no clear way of understanding what each one is about.
A good title says what you offer and where, in a natural way, and is different for every page. The same logic applies to the meta description, the short text under the title in the results: it does not decide your ranking on its own, but it affects how many people click.
4. Technical problems that slow things down or cause confusion
A site that is slow on a phone, has buttons that are too small or loads in jerks is penalised in the experience it offers and, as a knock-on effect, in the results too. Try it yourself from your smartphone, on mobile data and not on the office wifi. In Search Console you will also find reports on the usability and performance of your pages.
Then check three very concrete things:
- the site opens with https and without security warnings;
- there is only one version of the address (with or without “www”, not both showing duplicate content);
- internal links do not lead to “not found” pages (404 errors).
5. Google has no reason to trust you
For local businesses, trust built outside the website matters a great deal. A complete Google Business Profile listing, genuine reviews, a name, address and phone number that are identical wherever they appear (website, social media, industry directories) and a few mentions from local or industry sources show that the business exists and is reliable. If everything is fine in the previous checks and you still do not show up, the gap is often here.
It is not a matter of a trick: Google shows what it can read, understand and verify. The five causes are all about these three steps.
In what order to act
The order matters because each step depends on the previous one. First you make sure the site can be indexed, then that there is a page for every important search, then that titles and descriptions present them well, then you fix the technical obstacles and finally you work on trust. Jumping to point five without having solved the first only produces wasted work. After each change it takes days or weeks for Google to pick it up, so it is better to work calmly and check, without expecting immediate effects and without anyone being able to guarantee you a ranking.
If you want a quick check of many of these points at once, Trovavio analyses a website every week and shows what Google and artificial intelligence see, so you do not have to remember to repeat the checks by hand.
Where to start tomorrow
- Search for site:yourdomain.com on Google and note how many pages appear.
- Open Settings, Reading, and check that the box discouraging search engines is switched off.
- Register the site in Google Search Console, if you have not already, and look at the page indexing report.
- Write down the ten important searches and assign a page to each one, marking the ones that are missing.
- Check the title of the home page and the main pages: if they are identical or generic, rewrite them first.
These are five actions that take an hour or two in total and tell you precisely which of the five causes you are dealing with.
