Your cattery isn't showing up on Google. Here's why.

Type cattery SEO into Google and it doesn't even recognize it as a phrase. It offers you cattery Seoul and cattery Seattle instead, and the results are a joke article about what cats teach us about search engines and the Wikipedia entry for the word cattery. That's the state of the advice available to cat breeders, so this page is the version that assumes you have an actual problem.

1. Google may not have your pages at all

Start here, because everything else is wasted if this is the answer. Type site:yourwebsite.com into the Google search box, with no space after the colon. What comes back is every page of yours Google has found. If it lists three pages and your site has twelve, then nine of your pages might as well not exist, and no amount of writing will help them.

There are usually three reasons. Your site has no sitemap, which is simply a list of your pages that you hand to Google so it doesn't have to guess. Or there's a small settings file telling Google to stay away from something it should be reading. Or some pages aren't linked from any other page, and if nothing points at a page, nothing can walk to it.

2. You have one page per idea, not one page per search

A typical cattery site has Home, About, Our Cats, Kittens, Contact. Every one of those is a page about you. None of them is a page about the thing somebody typed.

Somebody looking for a kitten types the breed and the place. If you want that search you need a page whose whole subject is that breed in that place, with your actual cats on it and your actual town in the writing, not a keyword stuffed into the About page.

It's the single biggest change we make to most sites, and it's why pages like that are part of a build here rather than something we sell you afterwards.

3. Your breed and your town appear nowhere a machine can read

Photographs aren't text. A banner image with your cattery name on it says nothing to the software reading your site. Neither does a beautiful hero photograph with a caption in the image itself.

The test: open your home page, press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac), and search for your town. Then your breed. Then the word Ragdoll or Persian or Bengal in a heading. If your own page can't find them, neither can anything else.

4. There isn't enough on the page to rank for anything

A page with a couple of sentences on it hasn't given Google enough to work out what it's about, and a lot of cattery pages are a photo gallery with one sentence underneath.

The fix isn't padding the page. It's answering the questions you already get by email, which are the same questions people type into a search bar. Price, waiting time, health testing, what happens next, what the kitten goes home with.

5. Nothing tells an engine what you're

Every page can carry a short list of plain facts that only machines read: the name of the cattery, the town, the breed, which kittens are available. It sits behind the page and a visitor never sees it. Without it, Google and ChatGPT are working the whole thing out from your paragraphs and guessing.

This is the part a website builder like Wix usually won't let you get at, which isn't your fault and isn't something you can write your way around.

It matters more than it used to, because the thing answering the question is increasingly AI rather than a list of ten links. There's a separate page about that, because it's a separate problem.

What this looks like across the market

Breeders aren't careless. The bar is low, so a site that does the ordinary things properly has already done more than most of the sites we read.

What we do about it

The alternative on offer in this market is coaching that teaches you to do it yourself. That's a real option and it suits some people. This is the other one: we do the work, the prices are on the page, and you get your evenings back.

Every build includes the facts behind each page, the landing pages and the writing. Prices are on the packages page and they're the same for everyone.

Questions

Why is my cattery not showing up on Google?

Usually one of five things: Google hasn't found your pages, there's no page about the thing people search for, your breed and your town aren't written anywhere in plain text, your pages don't link to each other, or there is too little on the page for Google to judge. You can check all five yourself in about twenty minutes.

How long before my cattery shows up on Google?

Getting pages found and linked up properly can move things within a few weeks. A brand new page competing for a real search usually takes a few months to settle down. Anyone promising faster is guessing.

Do I need to blog?

Only if you have something to say that a buyer is searching for. Six articles that answer real questions beat sixty that fill a schedule, and an abandoned blog with three 2019 posts on it is worse than no blog.

Does my TICA or CFA listing help?

It's another place on the web that confirms your details, which helps. It is also a page you don't control, on a website Google trusts more than yours, so it can end up being the result people find instead of your site.

Can I do this myself?

Most of it, yes, and the list on this page is genuinely the order to do it in. The part that is hard on your own is the behind-the-scenes work, because a website builder like Wix won't give you access to the parts that need changing.