Why doesn’t your site show up on Google?
You have a handsome site, you have decent content, and Google still ignores you. It is one of the most common frustrations among business owners who put money into their web presence. In 80% of cases the cause is a single technical or editorial SEO mistake, one that can be named and corrected.
Mistake 1: title tags and meta descriptions left to drift
The title tag is the first thing Google reads to work out what a page is about. If it is missing, if it runs too long, or if it is identical on every page you own, you are sending search engines a negative signal. Every page needs its own title, 50 to 60 characters long, carrying its main keyword.
The meta description does not affect ranking directly, but it decides your click-through rate. A well-written meta description can double the number of visitors you receive from exactly the same position in the results.
Mistake 2: content that is too short or too generic
Google rewards pages that answer a question in full. A 200-word article on how to redo a bathroom cannot compete with a thorough 1,500-word guide. The aim is not to write long for the sake of writing long, but to cover the subject better than anyone else has.
Mistake 3: images left unoptimized
A 5MB image on your home page can multiply your load time by 10. That costs you twice over: on ranking, because Google measures the Core Web Vitals, and on conversion, because visitors abandon a slow site in under three seconds. Compress your images, name them with descriptive keywords, and fill in the alt tags.
Mistake 4: ignoring internal links
Internal linking, the simple act of pointing your own pages at each other, is one of the most powerful and most neglected tools in SEO. It carries authority from page to page, helps Google understand how your site is built, and steers visitors toward the pages where they convert.
Mistake 5: a site that does not hold up on mobile
Since 2019, Google has indexed the mobile version of a site first (mobile-first indexing). In 2026, 65% of web traffic comes from smartphones. A site that displays badly on a phone simply cannot rank well. Test yours on your own phone, now.
Mistake 6: a Google Business Profile left out of date
For local businesses, Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) often counts for more than the site itself in local searches. If your listing is incomplete, carries no recent photographs and shows the wrong opening hours, you lose customers on the results page itself. To push this lever further, see how to dominate local searches in the 64, the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department of south west France.
Mistake 7: neglecting page speed
Google measures the Core Web Vitals: LCP (how fast the main content loads), INP (how quickly the page answers an interaction, which replaced FID in March 2024) and CLS (visual stability). Weak scores have hit rankings directly since the Page Experience update of 2021. Use PageSpeed Insights to diagnose your site for free.
How do you correct these SEO mistakes quickly?
Start with a basic SEO audit: read your meta tags, measure your load speed, test how the site behaves on a phone, and check your Google Business listing. Those actions cost nothing and can shift the picture within a few weeks.
If you want to know which of these seven mistakes actually apply to you, ask us for a free reading of your site: we send back the list in priority order, with no obligation.
If you are short of time or short of expertise, monthly SEO support lets you correct these mistakes in an orderly way and watch your progress up the rankings.
To go further, bring in an SEO specialist in Pau and work through our SEO method, step by step, which takes these seven points one at a time on your own site.
In Paris, our SEO agency in Paris corrects these mistakes and tunes your site for the search engines.
All seven can be spotted in an hour of auditing. We do it as a matter of course at the start of ongoing SEO work in Pau.
