090: Is your website secretly telling Google to ignore you?

In this episode, Jules White lifts the lid on a common but overlooked issue: many websites - despite looking beautiful, are quietly blocking their own visibility in search results. Sharing a recent Power Hour with a business coach, Jules walks through the surprising fixes they uncovered in just one hour, including indexing issues, canonical errors, and page structure problems that were silently sabotaging the site’s SEO.

Jules explains why these problems often go undetected, especially when developers or SEO companies haven’t shown business owners how to check their own data or use tools like Google Search Console. She also shares how to spot outdated SEO practices and avoid common traps within platforms like FEA Create and other HighLevel white labels.

Key Takeaways:

• Broken Visibility: How one coach’s site looked great but wasn’t showing up on Google because her sitemap was broken and her pages weren’t being indexed.
• SEO Sabotage: The danger of misusing canonical tags and outdated “keywords” boxes in website builders.
• 28 H1s on One Page?!! Why heading structure matters and how to fix it quickly using a free Chrome plugin.
• Simple Tools, Big Impact: How using Google Search Console can show you what’s indexed and what Google sees when it crawls your site.
• Future-Proofing for AI Search: Why fixing these foundations now sets you up for better visibility in AI-powered search results.

If your website looks the part but isn’t bringing in visitors or leads, this episode is packed with practical checks and quick wins to help you move forward.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 31 – How to use Google Search Console to improve your SEO for more website traffic
• Episode 39 – The biggest website and SEO mistakes I see (and how to avoid them)
• Beginners Google Analytics 4 Course - GA4 Made Simple (& Google Search Console) – Step-by-step guide to setting up and using Google Search Console, ideal for beginners.
• Book a Website Clarity Power Hour – Get personalised advice and uncover your quick wins

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Website Success Show for more bite-sized SEO, website, and content optimisation tips. And if you ever feel stuck—remember, sometimes all it takes is one focused hour to change everything.

Chapters

• 0:00 Is your website secretly telling Google to ignore you?
• 2:06 Recent Power Hour case study
• 5:23 Issue #1: Sitemap problems
• 14:11 Issue #2: Canonical link mistakes
• 17:37 Issue #3: Page hierarchy problems
• 20:39 Issue #4: Outdated keyword practices
• 23:48 Preparing for AI search
• 26:24 Quick checks you can do this week

Transcript

Is your website secretly telling Google to ignore you?

Hello, happy Friday morning. Morning, morning.

Is your website secretly telling Google to ignore you? This is a really important question that I would like to ask today, and it's an issue that comes up time and time again, actually.

So, most people—and many people—think their website's fine because it looks good. Behind the scenes, there are tech issues going on that can make your content invisible or certainly make it a lot harder for Google to crawl through your website, understand what's going on with it, what your business is all about, and show you up in the search results, really.

And most business owners, or certainly most that I speak to, haven't been shown what to look for. So they've never had somebody explain this to them.

They've never had someone show them how to use Google Search Console or Google Analytics. Unfortunately, you don't know what you don't know.

It's one of those things, actually. Unless you have been shown this and shown the simple ways that you can look at these things, you cannot see what's going on or understand what's happening.

You cannot see those things that you are not showing up for, or you are showing up for, that you really should or shouldn't be, basically. So that's really important.

And so I just wanted to pop on today and have a chat about that. I have had quite a few power hours this month that have had the same sort of problems coming up again and again, really.

And I just wanted to share the behind-the-scenes from a recent Power Hour that I did just a couple of weeks ago.

Recent Power Hour case study

There was so much that came up in that one; it was like a real value-packed hour. We got so much done and uncovered so much in that time as well that will make a big difference to that client's SEO.

So this is really for anyone who feels like their website should be working better than it is, but they're not sure where to start. Really, they don't know where to begin.

So let's dive in.

The session was with a coach, and she's got a great website. The content looks beautiful, although there could certainly be a bit more development on the messaging and actually connecting with the problem that she solves and who her ideal clients are.

But, you know, it was a website that looked good and should be performing for her, really. Certainly, it should be performing a lot better, but she was finding that she wasn't really getting a lot of traffic from Google.

The website wasn't performing as she wanted it to. Basically, she'd built the website herself, I think.

But certainly, she wasn't sure if the SEO was set up correctly. She'd done that part herself as well.

She'd tried to do some bits, but she certainly wasn't confident that it was working as it should be, really, and she had no real data. So she didn't know what to look at.

She didn't know what data to check. She didn't even know where to actually check and see what was going on in terms of the number of visitors she was getting to her website or anything.

She wasn't sure if it was actually being indexed by Google. Not sure if she was getting any traffic to it or where that was coming from as well.

And her homepage and her messaging, if she was sending people directly to her website, she was finding that the messaging wasn't converting. So she was attracting people via referrals but not converting cold visitors through her website.

She wanted her site to feel more strategic and more professional rather than just existing, just being there online and not really doing anything for her. And she had been trying to get things working properly, but she didn't know where to start or what mattered the most, really.

So that was why she decided to book a Power Hour. We'd had a chat, we'd met through a networking group, and she decided to book a Power Hour with me to just see what we could uncover and discover and work out what was going wrong with it, really.

We had this great session. And then the next morning, she emailed me with a really thankful email.

She was so pleased with what we'd done. And she said she stayed up till 1:00 AM updating everything on her site, which I wouldn't necessarily recommend, but it's one of those things, I think, that once you know what to do and once you discover what's wrong, then actually a lot of it's quite simple stuff.

It doesn't have to all be techy, and even the techy stuff, once you know what to do, then it doesn't have to be such a big problem, really.

So I'm just going to talk through some of the things that we found because these are often things that come up on multiple power hours. So time and time again, these are the things that I tend to check for first.

With all of our power hours, we are looking for those low-hanging fruit.

Issue #1: Sitemap problems

We are looking for the things that we can make quick changes to and that can have a real difference to your SEO. It's the things that if you don't do those before you start making other changes, then you are actually setting yourself back a bit.

You're going to have a lot better results if you do these things first, really. So the first thing we did, we logged into Google Search Console once we'd had a little look at what her data was showing in terms of the queries and the pages, the search terms that Google was associating with her website.

We had a look at that first, and then we dug into the sitemap to make sure she actually had a sitemap submitted to Google. The one that she had linked was there.

It was showing an error; I think it was saying 'couldn't fetch'. So basically, there's a place in Google Search Console where you can go in and you can submit your sitemap, and every website should have a sitemap.

And essentially, all that is, is like a text file that tells search engines all of the pages in your website that should be added to the index. So it makes it easier for the bots to go through and crawl through your website.

It makes it easier for it to understand the structure of your website and what pages are important and which ones should be added to the index. So we worked out that there was an issue.

We then went into her website builder, and she was using a white-label version of HighLevel. It wasn't FEA Create; I can't remember which one it was.

It was one I hadn't heard of before, but there are so many white-label versions out there. So if you're using FG Funnels, FEA Create, Easy Peasy Funnels, there are all sorts of ones out there that you can use.

And with any of those, it's kind of the same backend. Ultimately, what's different is the support you get and the other things that are included.

So with FEA Create, you get access to the members' club as well, The Female Entrepreneur Association. That's why I recommend it.

I love FEA Create, and that's what I use for my stuff as well. So she was using this, so we could go in, and I knew there are some places within HighLevel, so FEA Create, within the backend that are often where people get tripped up.

For the sitemap, it doesn't handle it that well, I have to say. So when you add new pages to your website, you have to go in and tell it to actually add that new page to the sitemap and then recreate the sitemap.

And it sounds like a faff, it's really not. So if you have a procedure that you go through when you add a new website page, which ideally you should, to just take that mental load away of having to remember to do all of these things, then you just go in.

You just go to the sitemap part and make sure you've added that new page and that you've got this new sitemap. There was an issue with the sitemap that it was generating.

I can't remember now exactly what the issue was, but what we basically did is we just went in, we fixed the issue. We ticked the boxes for the pages that she wanted to actually be in the sitemap, and we grabbed that URL from the sitemap.

We regenerated a new one, I think. Actually, no, that was what the problem was.

It was the wrong sitemap, so it was the wrong address. So if you want to find the sitemap for your own website, a good way to do it is go to your website and just go to the homepage and then type in /sitemap.xml.

Quite often, that will be the address of your sitemap, but this one had added a dash one to it, and that wasn't the actual address of the sitemap. So we fixed that.

We then went and submitted the sitemap into Google Search Console. We had a couple of times where it was showing an error again, so we went off, we did something else, and just allowed the tech in the backend to catch up, which sometimes can be a case of doing that.

If Google Search Console is still coming up with errors, just try doing it again. And I would recommend probably waiting 24 hours and then trying again if you're still having issues.

I've certainly had this in the past where I've had those kind of 'couldn't fetch' errors coming up where Google is basically telling us, "I can't find the sitemap," or "I can't get hold of it, can't read it." And if we wait, then sometimes the tech catches up.

But with this one, we needed to fix the issue first, really. So we did that, and then eventually we managed to get it where it showed that it had read the sitemap properly.

It was showing today's date, it was going, it was green. So if there's an error, it would be red, and it had gone to green.

So that was good. And what that ultimately means is now that Google can properly crawl through her site and put it in its index properly.

And that significantly improves your SEO and certainly improves your chances of showing up in Google. And I'm talking about Google, but this also applies to any other search engines as well, and particularly AI search as well.

If that information is more readable, having these things like your sitemaps set up properly, then that helps with that as well. So making sure with whatever website builder you're using, that it does add the pages you want to the sitemap.

Make sure that pages aren't added into the sitemap that you would prefer not to be there as well. So things like checkout pages and thank you pages, stuff like that, that you wouldn't necessarily or wouldn't want to really appear in Google search results.

You wouldn't want that page to be the first page that somebody sees when they go from a search page to your website. Make sure that those are actually excluded from the sitemap.

Doing that, a really simple fix, just massively helps everything in that backend. And one of my Website Growth Club members this week, we also discovered that she had some issues with her pages and her indexing.

We were on our monthly Q&A call, and I was talking through some Google Search Console issues. And she immediately went into her Google Search Console, had a little look at what was going on, and realised that Google hadn't indexed a lot of her pages.

So she immediately went in and then submitted those to be, requested them to be indexed, which you can do in Google Search Console. There's a little search bar at the top, and you can submit any URL.

So you just go in and paste a URL from any new content on your website or existing content. And that will tell you whether that page is indexed in Google or not.

So I do this if I create a new blog post because I don't use the built-in blog builder in FEA Create yet, just because of some ways that it performs that I'm not that keen on. So I just build website pages for my blogs.

So every time I do that, when I create a new blog, I'll grab that URL, paste that into there, and then I'll ask Google to index that page. And eventually, Google would go through and index those pages, ideally.

But if you actually submit it, it means that then it happens more quickly. And I think this is really important to do as well, because what I realised recently, and I'm sure I've mentioned this anyway in previous podcast episodes, is that I went into my Google Search Console recently and realised a load of my blog posts that I'd been creating over the last few months hadn't been indexed in Google.

So I'd been in when I'd created the blogs and I'd requested indexing, and I'd never gone back in and checked that that had actually been done. Before that, when I was checking, they were all being indexed within 24 hours.

I could see that they'd been indexed by Google, so I kind of stopped checking. Not kind of, I did.

I just stopped having that as part of my procedures that I do. So I've added that back in now, and now in my keyword map and planner that I use to keep track of all of my web pages, what I'm trying to rank those pages for, what the meta titles and descriptions and things like that are in those pages, what content they link to and how they link together, I have now got an extra box in there.

Because I have a box for 'requested indexing', and now I've got a box for 'is actually indexed'. So I know whether Google has actually indexed those important pages that I want to show up in search.

Which is really annoying because I'd created some blog posts around AI SEO and things that, you know, I wanted those blog posts to be showing up to help to increase my authority. But, hey ho, you live and learn.

And it just goes to show as well that even if you are techy, even if you know all these things to do, sometimes we just need those little guardrails. Those little extra things that take away that need for us to actually remember to do it.

It's just part of the procedure so what I could do is when I release a blog, make sure the last blog that I have released has been indexed. So that just automatically then will prompt me to actually check that as well, really.

So yeah, that was annoying, but that was a long ramble to say, really, this is really common. This is really common, having these indexing problems that we don't realise are going on, really.

And you can check that in Google Search Console as well. You can check what pages are indexed, what pages aren't, and just make sure that those important pages are indexed.

If you need some help with setting up Google Search Console, I do have a short course on my website. My Google Analytics for Beginners course has a whole bonus module on Google Search Console, on setting it up, on using it.

So that's something that can help if you need some help on actually getting this set up. Obviously, you could book a Power Hour as well, so we could actually spend some time together looking at your site directly, which sometimes that's helpful, just having somebody there.

Sometimes you look at stuff and you don't necessarily know, as I say, you don't know what you don't know. The course does help with that; it helps to point out what you should be looking at, but sometimes just having another human's eyes on it is helpful as well.

So then the next issue we found in the Power Hour was something I saw when we were looking through the SEO settings within her platform, within the HighLevel white-label she's using. There's a box within the SEO settings that says 'canonical links'.

Issue #2: Canonical link mistakes

Canonical links are essentially where you tell Google that this page is a duplicate of another page on your website. So say you might have, for me, I've got a blog article about podcast SEO.

That may come up under the category of SEO, but also under the category of 'podcast' and maybe also under the category of 'visibility'. And depending on how people get through to that page, then you might have a URL that is thewebsitesuccesshub.com/blog/podcast-visibility or thewebsitesuccesshub.com/blog/SEO, which is for the category of SEO, /podcast-visibility, or whatever, if that makes sense.

So depending on how your categories are set up within your website, you can end up with these like sub-pages. But ultimately, what we want to tell Google is that this main article of these other URLs, which look the same—they look the same, but in Google's eyes, they're a completely separate page on your website.

So what we need to then do is let Google know that actually the main version of this, the one that I want you to put in the index, is thewebsitesuccesshub.com/podcast-visibility. And that's the primary version of this blog.

That tells Google that all of the other stuff is not duplicate content; it's just another version of this page. So they are important, canonical links.

For most people just getting started with SEO, they don't need to worry too much about this. What had happened here is I think probably they had heard about links, or they saw this box saying 'links' and they were thinking of backlinks.

And quite often, people do get confused about backlinks. You hear these things, and you hear, "Oh, I should be doing this, I should be building backlinks."

You see a box like that and you think, "Oh, okay, that's what I need to do." But unfortunately, what she had done is she had linked to other websites in there.

So she was thinking of backlinks of websites that she knew were linking to that page. So she'd actually put that in the canonical box, linking to that other website.

Unfortunately, what that was actually telling Google was that the other website's page was the real version of her page on her website and that they should ignore hers. So she was basically telling Google, "This is duplicate content of this other website."

Obviously, that's a massive signal to Google that this site isn't the one that they should be putting in the index. So we got rid of those straight away.

And once you understand it, once you know what to do with these things, that's fine. Basically, what she needed to do was nothing.

She didn't really have a lot of duplicate content or anything to worry about right now. So yeah, we took those out, which that massively helps because it makes sure that Google treats her site as original content.

That's going to improve her ranking potential and just help Google to know that this is a site that they should be putting in the index, really.

So then there was another one that always comes up.

Issue #3: Page hierarchy problems

Issues with the page hierarchy. I've talked about page hierarchy on multiple episodes.

So if we think of our website like an English essay, we want to have one heading at the top, which would be our H1 heading, and you would set that within your website builder. They're set up in a way that kind of makes us fail because they're set up for visuals.

So people will often use those heading tags to make it look different. And quite often, that then messes up the backend.

And so if people are using screen readers or accessibility tools, and also for the bots that are crawling through our website, it helps them to understand the website better. So think about your English essay.

You'd have one H1 heading, and then within that, you'd have some subheadings. They would be your H2s, and then you may have some sub-topics within those, and they would be H3 headings.

For most websites, you don't really need to go much lower than H3s. But you should never have a website that's got multiple H1s; on any webpage, you should have one H1 heading, which is telling Google that this is what this page is about.

This is the main topic of that page. Ideally, it should contain your target keyword, so whatever you're trying to get that page to show up for on Google, it should contain that naturally, if you can.

It's not always possible to do that, but yeah, we need to make sure that that hierarchy is set up in the correct way. And it's really simple to do this.

I use a tool called AIOSEO, which is a Google Chrome plugin that you can use. And you can just go to your website, you can just fire up the plugin, so just literally click on the box, and it will show you what headings you've got set on your page.

And often it is easier to do that than trying to work it out in the backend of your website builder. But she actually had got 28 H1 headings.

Which probably the way that happened is she created a box and then she duplicated it, and that was already set at the H1 heading level. So she was just basically duplicating that throughout the page.

But it is a big problem. Even having 28 H2 headings on a page could potentially be a lot because we are wanting to tell Google how it can pick out the main points of this webpage and what the content is about, ultimately.

So better page organisation, better page hierarchy, is something that is key. It's going to be key for moving forward with AI SEO as well.

It's really important that the structure of our pages is readable by the bots. So it also helps with user experience as well.

It helps to improve that, and it helps us to then think about our pages in a more logical way. It helps us to think about the hierarchy of the pages and what we're trying to get across.

What are the important points and how can we break our content up as well? And that's one of the things with AI SEO, is making sure that our content is broken up into chunks of readable text, very easily digestible text, really.

And it gives really strong SEO signals as well. So you can even within those H2 headings, try and get your keywords in there as well, naturally, maybe variations of them, maybe related topics as well, so that you show that you know what you're doing, basically.

So what else did we have? Oh, so she was using the keywords box as well.

Issue #4: Outdated keyword practices

So in some website builders, you'll see a little box that says 'keyword'. And this is something which is really outdated.

Years ago, we used to have to tell Google what a page was about because Google wasn't as good at actually reading through the content of the page. But now if you think of Google, it is a lot smarter.

You can't just say, "This is what that page is about." I always think of it like a stroppy teenager: "No, I'll decide what this page is about, thank you very much. I don't need you to tell me what it's all about."

So that's something that's quite an outdated practice. We don't need to use those keyword boxes.

And certainly, if you are planning to use them, then I would say don't. But just stuffing a load of keywords in there is quite often what I'll see people do.

They think, "What do I want my website to show up for?" So they'll put every keyword they want their website to show up for in that keyword box, despite the fact that they haven't mentioned those keywords anywhere else on that page.

So Google then treats it as a spammy sort of practice or certainly something that it doesn't pay attention to. So, best-case scenario, Google ignores it.

Worst-case scenario, Google actually treats that as something that's spammy, and then it has a negative effect on your SEO rankings as well. So really important to think about that and just if you see that keyword box, just don't bother using it, really.

There were a few other issues as well that did come to light. I'm not going to go into all of them here, but there are often these common problems that come up if you don't know what you don't know.

Then how can you fix them? And these are things I think for this client, I don't know that she would ever have realised these things were going on.

It certainly would've taken her a lot of time and effort to try and figure these things out. Most people aren't shown this stuff by their developers or their SEO people, and that's something that comes up time and time again in conversations, especially recently.

People have been working with SEO companies, and they've got no idea about their analytics. So maybe they get sent a confusing report once a month.

Maybe not. Maybe they don't get anything.

Maybe they've never been shown, they've never been talked through the strategy. "Okay, this is where you are right now, this is what's happening."

You can look at this data yourself, and if you've got any ideas, if you know what things you want to be showing up for and you're not—because it's your business, ultimately, at the end of the day. Working with professionals can be helpful because they might help you to understand how to actually achieve what you want to achieve with your rankings and whether it's even possible.

I think that's sometimes the thing as well is actually just taking that step back and letting people know, "Okay, you want to show up for SEO, but that's way too competitive." There's no way I am going to be showing up just for the term 'SEO'.

So we need to look at other ways that I can do that, really. And it's the same with any business.

But until you know these things, until you're able to actually look at the data and know that Google is ranking my website for this particular search term and averagely, I'm showing in position 11 for that. "Okay, what can we do to try and improve that so I can hop over onto page one and then get a lot more traffic coming through to my website from that?"

That's something that often people aren't having those conversations with their developers or with their SEO people. Right now as well, I'll have conversations with people about thinking about what they need to do moving forward as well.

Preparing for AI search

So the work you're doing right now is helping you to set up to show up in AI searches as well because it is coming. Things have already changed, and the businesses that embrace that and the businesses that try and move forward are the ones who can profit from this.

Things are going to change very quickly, and for a lot of businesses, this isn't even on their radar. And I've had a few conversations recently where their SEO person hasn't even mentioned it to them.

And it's something that we need to be thinking about. We certainly need to be thinking about what we can do to sort of future-proof our website.

If we think back to the days before the internet when websites started appearing, those businesses who then dug their heels in and said, "No, I don't want a website, I don't want to be on the internet," they would be the businesses that would struggle. And the ones who were there and had a website and were sort of innovating, really, are the ones that then just had massive opportunities for growth.

So I think it's really important we think about that, and it is really important that we have these conversations and that we make sure that we are making informed decisions. So that's why when clients come to work with me, I always make sure that the first thing we do is dive into the data.

We are having a look at what's going on and where they are right now so they can understand things moving forward, really. And as I say, you don't know what you don't know.

You can't read the label from the inside of the jar. And often, you don't see these things on your website that are potential quick wins and things that are so obvious.

Once I point them out, I can see people just go, "Oh my God, yeah, that's really obvious that I'm not talking about what I do or I'm not talking about the problems that I solve." An example I've given before a few times is where I was working with a counsellor who had been told when she was doing her training that the term PTSD was too competitive, so she couldn't rank for that.

So that had then put a little blocker on her, that she then hadn't mentioned it anywhere across her website. She hadn't mentioned the term 'PTSD' anywhere, despite the fact that that was her specialty.

It was the thing that she was so good at helping clients with. Something that was so needed and really should be her authority.

And yes, she's not going to be showing up for just 'PTSD', but she would be showing up for helping people in her area and helping her clients with that specialty, really. And once I pointed that out to her, then obviously it's like, "Yeah, I should probably be mentioning that, shouldn't I, if that's something I specialise in, really?"

And these aren't rare issues; this is something that comes up all the time. So on multiple power hours, it's often the same issues that come up.

And I love it because I really feel like people just get those light-bulb moments, and I really enjoy doing them, really.

Quick checks you can do this week

Some quick checks that you can try for this week shouldn't take you too long to do. Just log into your Google Search Console and make sure your pages are being indexed.

If you're not sure how to do that, I've got episode 31, which is "How to Use Google Search Console to Improve Your SEO for More Website Traffic." And also, I've got my Google Analytics course as well.

I'll link to that in the show notes. That has got a bonus module that's all about Google Search Console.

So even if you don't do the Google Analytics part, I would definitely suggest setting that up as well. But you can just go in and set up that Google Search Console, make sure that's all there, and that can just be gathering data in the background.

Even if you're not thinking about doing anything with your SEO right now, then it's great to have that gathering data in the background. Check how many H1s you have, even just on your homepage or one page of your website, a sales page or something.

Check how many H1 headings you have. You can use that Google Chrome browser plugin, which is AIOSEO.

Use that, and that will easily tell you what's going on. You might have some light-bulb moments there as well, and then make sure that you change them.

Make sure you've only got one set. And then check you're not using those old SEO tactics, like adding keywords to a box that says 'keywords' in your website builder as well.

And one of the most popular episodes, in fact, actually the most popular episode of the podcast so far, has been episode 39, which is "The Biggest Website and SEO Mistakes I See and How to Avoid Them." So I would definitely recommend going and having a listen to that as well.

You don't necessarily need to have a full SEO strategy and a full website strategy to get some quick wins, to make some progress, and to feel like you have some more clarity. Sometimes all you need is just a Power Hour, which is really focused on what you can do right now and what you should focus on first.

So sometimes that's all you need. So definitely, I would not think that you've got to dive into everything all at once.

I love helping people with this. So feel free to book a Power Hour with me if you want some clarity, if you want some help.

You can always send me a message if you're not sure if you need one, if you're not sure it's right for you. And I'll pop the link in the show notes if you'd like to book one.

So I hope you have a lovely weekend. I will definitely be swimming tomorrow.

We are celebrating this weekend because my dad has come out of hospital after four months, so that's really great. And we'll just be trying to keep the dog cool as well because it's so warm here.

So I hope you have a lovely weekend, and I'll see you soon. Bye.