CHART MBR / SEC 140 / DIAGNOSTIC
Why a Teesside fabrication firm's site ranks nowhere
A site can be well designed, recently built and completely invisible. Work through the causes in the order below, because the cheapest checks are also the most decisive.
How this check is structured
Causes below, ordered so the cheapest and most decisive check comes first.
FIXEDRankings a page holds while it sits outside the index, however good the copy is.
MECHANISMPage most firms optimise. One homepage cannot compete for six distinct processes.
MECHANISMRun these in order and stop at the first one that fails. Fixing cause five while cause one is still true wastes the money and hides the result.
The pages are not in the index
Nothing else matters while this is true. A page Google has not indexed cannot rank at any position for any query.
Verify it directly. Google Search Console reports every page it has excluded and states a reason for each exclusion, which turns guesswork into a list.
Four causes account for most of what you will find.
- A robots file blocking a directory nobody has read in three years.
- A noindex tag left behind when a staging site went live.
- A canonical tag pointing every page at the homepage.
- A build where the content only appears once scripts have run.
The staging leftover is the most common one on recently rebuilt industrial sites. It is also a five minute fix once somebody has actually looked.
One services page is carrying eight capabilities
This is the single most common structural fault on Teesside engineering sites. A services page lists structural steel, pipework, pressure vessels, platework, machining, site installation, maintenance and inspection in one bulleted block.
Google has nothing to rank for any one of them. The page is about eight things, so it is strongly about none, and every competitor with a dedicated page beats it on all eight.
Splitting them is the fix. One page per process, each with real specification detail, each linked from the services page and from the others where the work overlaps.
Depth is what makes the split worth doing. A thin page per capability repeats the original problem in a longer format.
Matching the symptom to the cause
Symptoms rarely name their own cause. This table pairs what you can observe with the check that settles it.
| What you see | The check that settles it | Usual cause |
|---|---|---|
| No traffic at all, including for the company name | Page indexing report in Search Console | Blocked, noindexed or unindexed |
| Traffic only for the company name | Query report, filtered to non-brand terms | No page targets a commercial query |
| Impressions but almost no clicks | Average position for those queries | Ranking beyond the first few pages |
| One page gets everything, the rest nothing | Page level click report | Capabilities merged onto one page |
| Traffic fell off a cliff on a known date | Redirect check on the old URLs | Rebuild without redirects |
| Good rankings, no enquiries | Phone number and form on the ranking page | Wrong intent or no route to contact |
MECHANISM The pairings above describe how these systems behave and how to test them. No figure in this table is a measurement of any firm.
The site speaks a different language from its buyers
Marketing vocabulary and buying vocabulary diverge badly in this sector. A firm describes itself as delivering bespoke metalwork solutions to a range of industries while its buyers search for a process, a material and a standard.
Nobody types the first phrase. Somebody types the second one every week.
Fix it by writing down what a buyer would type before writing the page. Process names, alloy names, standards, thickness ranges, sector terms and place names are the raw material.
The fabricator retrieval guide covers the same discipline from the AI assistant side, because both channels reward the same plain statements of fact.
The two failures that arrive with a rebuild
A rebuild loses URLs unless somebody maps them deliberately. Every old page that returns an error instead of redirecting to its replacement discards whatever standing it had accumulated.
Check this on any site that lost traffic on a date somebody remembers. The date usually matches a launch.
The second failure is the capability statement. A firm's strongest material sits inside a downloadable document while the pages themselves stay thin, which leaves the best content on the site invisible to search.
Moving that material onto pages is covered step by step in the capability statement guide. The full cluster is indexed on the Teesside industrial guide.
Frequently asked questions
Our site looks good and cost a lot. Why does it get no traffic?
Looking good and being findable are separate problems solved by different people. Most industrial sites are built to reassure a buyer who already knows the firm, which is a brochure job rather than a discovery job. The design usually survives the fix untouched.
How do I check whether Google has our pages at all?
Set up Google Search Console for the domain and read the page indexing report. It names every excluded page and gives a reason for each. Doing this costs nothing and settles the first question before anyone quotes you for anything.
Do we need a new website to fix this?
Usually not, and a rebuild often makes things worse by losing established URLs. Sites I look at typically have adequate foundations and a structure problem. Restructuring what exists is faster and cheaper than starting again.
We rank for our company name but nothing else. What does that mean?
It means the site is indexed and nothing on it targets a commercial query. Ranking for your own name proves only that Google can find you when somebody already knows you exist. The fix is pages that answer what buyers search for instead.
How long does a fix like this take to show?
Technical corrections can register within days of a recrawl. New pages competing for real commercial queries take longer because they have to accumulate the signals that rank them. Reporting on a fixed monthly cycle shows the direction rather than forcing you to wait for one verdict.
Getting a straight answer on your site
Most of this diagnostic you can run yourself in an afternoon. Ringing somebody is faster when the first two checks come back clean and the traffic still is not there.
Direct line 07305 523333. One person answers and does the work.