The answer, more often than not, is that Google doesn’t see what you see.
In fact, Google doesn’t really see your website at all – not in the way you do. It reads it. And what it’s reading for has very little to do with how the page looks.
This post explains the difference and shows you how to check where your own site stands.
Google is not a person
When you visit a website, you experience it visually. You notice the layout, the colours, whether it feels trustworthy, whether the copy is clear. You form an impression in seconds.
Google’s crawler – the bot that visits your site and decides how to rank it – does none of that.
It reads the underlying code. It looks at the text. It checks specific signals that tell it what the page is about, who it’s for, and whether it should show it to people searching for relevant terms.
A beautiful website that Google can't read properly is like a brilliant shop with the shutters down.
That means all the time spent on fonts, colour palettes and layout – none of it factors into your search ranking. What matters is what’s in the code behind the design.
What Google is actually looking for
Google uses hundreds of signals to rank pages, but the most foundational ones are also the most commonly overlooked. Here are the three we see businesses get wrong most often.
1. Your meta title and description
These are the two lines that appear when your page shows up in Google search results. The title is the blue clickable link. The description is the short paragraph underneath.
Most people never set these deliberately. WordPress or their theme picks something automatically – often the page name, or worse, a chunk of random copy from the top of the page.
Google uses your title to understand what the page is about. It uses your description to decide whether it’s worth showing. And the person searching uses both to decide whether to click.
Get them wrong and you lose visibility. Get them right and you get more clicks from the same position in results.
The rules are simple: title under 60 characters, description between 70 and 160, and both should clearly describe what the page is about – ideally using the words your customers would actually search for.
2. Your heading structure
Every page should have one H1 – a single main heading that tells Google (and the reader) exactly what the page is about. Think of it as the title of a newspaper article.
Below that, H2s act as section headings. H3s sit underneath those. It’s a hierarchy, and Google reads it like an outline.
The problems we see most often:
- No H1 at all – common on pages built entirely in page builders where headings are styled visually rather than tagged correctly
- Multiple H1s – usually because someone styled their headline as H1 and then used the same tag for subheadings
- Headings used for styling rather than structure – making something an H2 because it looks the right size, not because it’s a section heading
None of these are visible problems. The page looks fine. But to Google, the structure is confusing and a confused Google is a Google that ranks you lower.
3. Image alt text
Google cannot see images. It has no idea whether your homepage image is a photo of your team, a product shot, or a stock image of someone pointing at a laptop.
The only way it knows is through alt text – a short description added to each image in the code. When alt text is missing, Google ignores the image entirely.
This matters for two reasons. First, images with good alt text can rank in Google Image Search – another source of traffic most businesses completely overlook. Second, missing alt text is also an accessibility issue: screen readers use it to describe images to visually impaired users.
It’s one of the quickest fixes on any website, and one of the most commonly ignored.
The good news
All three of these issues are fixable. None of them require a redesign. Most can be sorted in an afternoon if you know what you’re looking at.
The problem is that most business owners have no idea they exist – because everything looks fine on the surface.
You can't fix what you can't see. The first step is finding out what's actually there.
See what Google sees on your website - free
We built a free tool that scans any page and emails you a report covering all three areas above. It takes 30 seconds and there’s no account required.
The report tells you exactly what’s there, what’s missing, and what needs attention. No jargon, no obligation.
If you want us to fix anything, we’re here. If you just want the information, that’s fine too.
One last thing
If you run the scan and your scores are good – great. That’s genuinely useful to know.
But if there are issues, don’t be disheartened. These are some of the most common problems we see on small business websites, and they’re almost always the result of a platform default or an oversight rather than anything fundamental.
The websites that rank well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones where someone has paid attention to the basics.
