Why Your SEO Keeps Failing: The Hidden Problem of Page Indexing & How to fix it
Before & After Image Of Webpages Getting Indexed On SERP
You've spent countless hours researching keywords, optimizing titles and headers, writing quality content, and building backlinks. Only to find that your site is still buried in Googles search engine results page (SERP), or with little to no results at all. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
One of the most overrated reasons SEO (Search Engine Optimization) fails is a lack of proper keyword research or poor content. It is something much more basic: your pages may not even be getting indexed by Google.
What Does It Mean to Get Indexed?
When Google "indexes" a page, it means it has found it, crawled it, and added it to its database so it can appear in search results (SERP). If a page isn't indexed, it's invisible to Google and no matter how SEO-friendly it is, it might as well not exist.
Many website owners assume that just publishing a page is enough. But that’s not always the case.
Why Do Pages Not Get Indexed?
There are several reasons why your pages might not be indexed:
- No internal or external links pointing to them
- Blocked by robots.txt or meta tags
- Keyword stuffing: Too many of the same keywords or keyword frequency.
- Technical issues (404 errors, redirects, duplicate content)
- Slow site speed or poor mobile usability
- Google just hasn’t discovered the webpages yet
And the worst part? You might not even realize it until months later.
Case Study: 3 Months of “Failed” SEO for a SEO project located in West Orange, NJ & WHY?
Recently, we worked with a small business called “Sand Castle Kitchen” located in Boca Raton, FL who hired us to help boost her site’s organic traffic. This is her website for reference: www.sandcastlekitchens.com. We rolled out a comprehensive SEO plan: optimized her pages, built new landing pages targeting specific keywords, improved on-page content, the whole package.
But after some time, we were scratching our heads. No increase in rankings. No spike in traffic. Something didn’t add up.
So we dug deeper.
Using a number of different Google Software Tools, we checked the Index Coverage Report and that’s when we found the issue.
15 of the new pages we had created for SEO purposes were not being indexed. Google hadn’t picked them up at all.
We immediately took action. One by one, we manually submitted each page to Google for indexing using the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Within a few days…
15 new webpages were indexed on Google Search Engine.
And within a week? They started showing up in search results. Rankings began to climb. It was a lightbulb moment for us and for the client.
What This Means for Your Business
This experience was a powerful reminder: SEO is about more than just keywords and content. If Google doesn’t see your page, it can’t rank your page.
So if you’re doing SEO and seeing no movement, here’s what you should check:
- Use Google Software Tools. Look at which pages are indexed and which aren’t.
- Manually request indexing for important pages, especially new ones.
- Fix technical issues like crawl errors or blocked resources.
- Build internal links to help Google find orphaned pages.
- Use XML sitemaps and submit them to Google.
Final Thoughts
SEO can feel like a mystery sometimes, but the first step to getting found on Google is making sure your content exists in its eyes. If you’re pouring time and money into SEO but getting zero return, check your indexing the solution might be simpler than you think.
Want help diagnosing your site? Get in touch with us. We’ll help you figure out what’s holding your SEO back.