Checking Your Website on Google: Where It Ranks and What Is Broken

There is a question we hear from website owners all the time: the site has been live for six months and has not brought a single inquiry. Which tools show a website’s “score”, and is there a tool that tells you what is wrong with the site and what must change?

This post is an organized answer to that question. It is for business owners with an existing website that brings no inquiries, who want to find the problem on their own, for free, without technical knowledge. We will go through six checks, in the order worth doing them:

1. Does Google know the site at all
2. Where does the site rank, and for which searches
3. What is the speed score, and why mobile comes first
4. What is the technical score, and what it does not tell you
5. Is your Google Business Profile connected to the site
6. What happens once a real visitor arrives

And at the end: a short table of what to fix first, based on what you found.

First: there is no single “score” for a website

The short answer: no single tool gives a website an overall score. There are several tools, and each measures something different. That matters, because a site can score 100 in one tool and still bring no inquiries.

To understand why a site brings no customers, answer three questions, in this order:

• Do people find it? Google knows the site and shows it for the right searches.
• Do people enter it? Those who see it in the results click.
• Do people contact you from it? Those who arrive understand what you offer and know how to reach you.

Each check below answers one of these questions.

Check 1: Does Google know the site at all?

The simplest check, and it takes ten seconds. Open Google and type the word site, a colon and your site’s address, with no spaces:

site:yoursite.com

Replace yoursite.com with your own address. Google will show only pages from your site that it knows.

• No results at all: Google does not know the site. This is the first problem to solve, and nothing else matters before it. Sometimes the cause is a setting left over from the build. In WordPress, for example, there is a checkbox that asks search engines not to index the site, and it is sometimes ticked during the build and forgotten.
• Some results, but fewer than the pages on the site: some pages did not make it into Google. The next check shows how to find out why.
• All the pages are there: great, Google knows the site. Move on to where it shows it.

Good to know: the result count Google shows here is a rough estimate, not an exact count. The check is good for knowing whether the site exists on Google, not for counting pages.

Check 2: Where does the site rank (and why not to search for yourself)

The first thing most site owners do is search Google for their service and scroll until they find their site. That is not a reliable check. Google personalizes results for each person: by the city they search from, their browsing history and their device. Someone who visits their own site every day will see it higher than a new customer does.

The real number comes from Google Search Console, a free Google tool. You connect your site once: Google asks you to prove the site is yours, and whoever built it can do that in a few minutes. From then on the tool collects data.

In Search Console, open Performance and tick the four metrics:

• Clicks: how many times people clicked your site in search results.
• Impressions: how many times the site was shown in results, even without a click.
• Average CTR: the percentage of impressions that became clicks.
• Average position: where, on average, the site appears in the results.

Below the chart is a table of queries: the exact words people typed before seeing your site. This may be the most interesting data in the whole tool, because it sometimes reveals that Google links your site to searches you never thought of.

A few things to know when reading the data:

• Positions 1 to 10 are roughly page one. Position 30 is already page three, and almost nobody gets there.
• The data arrives a few days late, so there is no point checking every morning.
• The Pages report shows which pages Google did not index, and why. The URL Inspection tool checks a specific page and lets you ask Google to crawl it.

In our keyword research post we explained how to use the queries Search Console shows to decide which topics to write about on your site.

Check 3: The speed score, and why mobile comes first

This is the “score” most people mean. Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste your site’s address and get a score from 0 to 100, separately for mobile and desktop.

The rules in short: 90 and above is green and good, 50 to 89 is orange, and below 50 is red. Look at mobile first, because that is where most visitors are, and Google ranks a site by its mobile version. The score also moves a little between runs, so run it a few times and do not panic over a difference of a few points.

A full explanation of how to read the report and what to do with the list of fixes is in our post on speed testing tools.

Check 4: The technical score, and what it does not tell you

The same PageSpeed Insights report has three more scores: Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. They check the technical basics: whether every page has a title and description, whether Google is allowed to crawl the page, whether images have alt text, and whether links can be crawled.

A low score here is a real red flag and worth fixing. But understand the other side too: an SEO score of 100 does not mean the site will rank first. The audit does not know whether your content answers what customers search for, how many competitors you have, or whether Google trusts the site. It only confirms there is no basic technical obstacle. The same is true for accessibility, and we wrote a whole post about it: a score of 100 in accessibility is not compliance.

Check 5: Your Google Business Profile

A business that serves a specific area, like a plumber in Haifa or a beautician in Ra’anana, gets a large share of its customers through the map and local results, not only through the website itself. That is where your Google Business Profile appears.

Where to check? In two places, because the profile has two sides:

1. What customers see: open a private (incognito) window, which in Chrome on a computer is Ctrl+Shift+N, and search Google for your business name. Check the Google Maps app too.
2. What you manage: sign in to the Google account the profile was created with, and search Google for your business name. A panel for managing the business appears above the results, where you can see and edit every detail. You can also go straight to business.google.com.

Cannot find a profile anywhere? The business probably has none, or it was started and never completed. Create or complete it at business.google.com, where Google also asks you to verify that the business is yours.

Once you have found the profile, check four things:

• In the private window search: does the profile appear on the side of the screen on desktop, or at the top of the results on mobile?
• In the management panel: is the profile verified, and does its primary category describe your main service?
• Does it link to your site, and does the link work?
• Are the name, address and phone number identical to those on your site?

The profile and the site strengthen each other, and in our post on that pairing we covered how to connect them properly.

Check 6: What happens once a visitor arrives

This is the check no automated tool does, and sometimes it explains the whole story. A site can rank nicely on Google and still bring no inquiries, because whoever arrives does not understand what is offered or cannot find how to get in touch.

Open the site on your phone and check:

• Is it clear within five seconds what the business does, and for whom?
• Is a WhatsApp or phone button visible without scrolling, and does tapping it actually start a conversation?
• Are there testimonials, photos of real work, or another reason to trust you?

And one more check almost nobody does: send yourself an inquiry through the form on your site. Did it reach your email? How fast? A form that stopped sending without anyone noticing makes a site look like it brings no inquiries, when in fact the inquiries are simply lost. It happened to us once too, and since then we check it regularly.

We gathered more mistakes of this kind in 7 mistakes we have seen on hundreds of small business websites, and covered how to turn visitors into inquiries in our post on WhatsApp and forms.

Common mistakes when checking your site

• Searching for yourself every day. The results are personalized to you and do not show what a customer sees. Check in Search Console, once a week or once a month.
• Chasing 100. Going from 92 to 100 on speed will barely change anything for the business. Going from 35 to 85 on mobile will.
• Checking only the home page. Customers often land on a service page or a post. Check the pages that appear in Search Console too.
• Judging by a single month. Organic search builds slowly. Compare three months with the three before them, not week to week.
• Changing everything at once. Change one thing, wait and check. Otherwise you cannot tell what helped.

What to fix first, based on what you found

The checks return a lot of information. To avoid getting lost, start from the first stage where the chain breaks. There is no point improving the form on a site Google does not know.

Summary

The question “what is my website’s score” has no single number, and for good reason: a site needs to be found, entered and contacted from, and each stage is checked with a different tool. Search Console tells you whether you are found and where you rank, PageSpeed Insights tells you whether the site is fast and technically sound, and the phone check tells you whether visitors know what to do. All six checks can be done alone and for free, and most site owners will find where the chain breaks within the first two.

And if your site has gone six months without a single inquiry, it does not need another score. It needs to know at which stage the customers disappear, and that is exactly what these checks show.

Want us to run every check for you and tell you what to fix first? Send us your site ↗