Why your website doesn't show up on Google

First, separate two different problems

"Not showing up" almost always means one of two things, and they get fixed differently.

• Google doesn't have your pages at all. That's an indexing problem, and it's usually something specific and fixable.
• Google has your pages, but ranks other sites above you. That's a competition problem, and it takes ongoing work.

Search for your exact business name first. If your site doesn't come up for your own name, you have the first problem. Start at the top of this list.

1. The site is brand new

New sites take time. Days for your business name, longer for anything competitive. If it's been a couple of weeks and nothing at all is indexed, stop waiting and keep reading, because something is blocking it.

2. Google hasn't indexed it, and nobody asked it to

Set up Google Search Console, verify your site, and submit your sitemap. Then use URL Inspection on your home page. It will tell you whether the page is indexed, and if it isn't, it usually tells you why. This is free, it takes ten minutes, and it replaces a lot of guessing.

3. Something is telling Google to stay away

This is the most common real cause, and it's almost always left over from building the site.

• A noindex tag. One line in the page code that tells search engines to leave the page out. Staging sites are built with it on, and it ships to the live site more often than anyone admits.
• robots.txt blocking crawlers. A single "Disallow" line can hide the whole site.
• A password or "coming soon" mode still switched on in the site builder.

You can check the first two yourself: visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and read it, and use URL Inspection in Search Console for the noindex tag.

4. The pages point at each other, or somewhere else

Sites often end up with several addresses for the same page: with and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash. If those aren't pointed at one address, you've split your own site into copies that compete with each other. A canonical tag left pointing at a developer's domain does the same thing, and it happens surprisingly often after a rebuild.

5. You're searching for something nobody else searches for

If you only ever check your business name, you don't know much yet. Search the way a customer would: the service plus the town. Also remember that Google personalizes results by your location and your history, so what you see at your desk is not what a customer three towns over sees. Search Console shows you the searches you actually appear for, which beats guessing.

6. There's no page about the thing you want to rank for

A lot of small business sites have four pages: home, about, services, contact, with every service listed in one paragraph on the services page. Google has nothing specific to rank. If a service matters to your business, it deserves its own page that answers the questions customers ask about it.

7. The content only appears after JavaScript runs

Some page builders render text through JavaScript. Google can handle a lot of that, but it's slower and less reliable than plain HTML, and it's a common reason pages get indexed with almost nothing in them. If you view your page's source and can't find your own headline in it, that's worth checking.

8. Nobody links to you, including you

Links are part of how Google judges how well known a business is. You don't need hundreds. A local chamber listing, a supplier's dealer page, the sponsor list from the team you paid for, all count. Your own internal links matter too: a page nothing links to is a page Google treats as unimportant.

What to check in the next ten minutes

1. Search your business name

   If your site isn't there, it's an indexing problem, not a ranking problem.

2. Read yoursite.com/robots.txt

   Look for "Disallow: /". That one line can hide everything.

3. Run your home page through Search Console's URL Inspection

   It tells you whether Google has the page, and usually why it doesn't.

4. Search your main service plus your town

   Now you know whether you're missing or just outranked.

When it's worth paying someone

If the problem is a blocked site or a broken redirect, that's an afternoon of work and you may be able to get your web person to do it. If Google has your pages and ranks competitors above you, that's ongoing work on your site, your content, and your local listings, which is what SEO and local SEO is. Either way, we'll take a free look and tell you which one you've got. If you're missing from the map results specifically, read what a Google Business Profile actually does first.