Technical SEO

Google couldn't see 85% of the site.

A window and door company kept hearing it needed more content. That was never the problem. Google couldn't see most of the site it already had.

For a regional window & door company that ranked for 1,600+ keywords but was hiding most of its own pages.

The hidden problem

On paper the site looked fine. It ranked for over 1,600 keywords and scored 97 out of 100 on-page. But the sitemap, the list that tells Google which pages exist, had 32 pages on it. The site had 226. Google was being told most of the site wasn't there.

85%

of the company's own pages were invisible to Google

Not from missing content. The list that tells Google what exists only covered a fraction of it.

The other leaks

No page on the site had info Google can read about the business. Its competitors did. It also ranked #4 for its most valuable search but wasn't in the Google map results, which bring in three to five times the leads of a normal listing. That one gap was the biggest money lever of the whole project.

The part most audits get wrong

The crawl flagged 30+ types of issues. Most SEO reports hand over that whole list and call it thorough. I sorted it instead.

Fixed first: 80% of the impact

Rebuilt the sitemap with all 226 pages
Pointed Google straight to the sitemap
Added business, service and FAQ info Google can read
One template fix that cleared 13 blog issues at once
Shortened titles on the top pages

Skipped on purpose: noise

Speed flags on a site already scoring 97/100
Cosmetic title warnings
"Thin content" flags on photo pages
URL format flags that were already fine
Old tag warnings Google ignores

Spending a quarter of a small budget on 5% of the growth is how most SEO money gets wasted. The skill is knowing which five things matter and skipping the other thirty.

What it meant for the business

I don't have a clean sales number for the SEO fixes on their own, and I won't invent one.

What I can show: the same company closed $150,876 in sales from Google Ads in 3 months, tracked in their CRM. Those ads send people to the same site I fixed.

Read the Google Ads story →

How I found it

Google Search Console Screaming Frog DataForSEO Live Google checks

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