Why your website isn't showing up on Google

You built a website. You search for what you do. You’re not there. Somebody you’ve never heard of is on top, and they’ve been trading half as long.

Here’s how to work out why, in the order actually worth checking. Most of this you can do yourself in an afternoon.

First: are you indexed at all?

Search Google for site:yourbusiness.com.

If nothing comes back, Google doesn’t know your site exists, and no amount of keyword work will help until that’s fixed. Usual causes:

The site is blocking crawlers in robots.txt — very common on sites that launched from a staging environment where blocking was correct.
There’s a noindex tag left over from development.
The site is new and simply hasn’t been crawled yet. This takes days to weeks.
There’s no sitemap and nothing links to you, so there’s no path in.

Set up Google Search Console. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and it will tell you directly what Google thinks of every page. If you do one thing from this article, do this one — you cannot fix what you cannot see.

Second: are you competing for the wrong words?

Most small businesses target words they’ll never win and ignore the ones they would.

“Plumber” is not a realistic target. “Emergency plumber Winter Park” might be. The more specific the phrase, the fewer people search it — and the more of them are about to buy.

Look at what you actually want to rank for and ask three questions:

Would someone type this? Not industry language. What a customer types at 11pm when their water heater has failed.
Do they want to buy, or are they reading? “How does an HVAC system work” brings you students. “AC repair near me” brings you customers.
Who’s currently on page one, and can you realistically displace them? If it’s three national directories and Home Depot, pick a different phrase.

Third — and for local businesses, most important

For anyone serving a geographic area, your Google Business Profile matters more than your website. Often much more.

The map pack — the three businesses with the map, above the regular results — is where most local clicks go. It is fed primarily by your Business Profile, not your site.

So:

Claim and verify the profile.
Get the category exactly right. This is the single highest-impact field, and most businesses pick something approximate.
Make sure your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere they appear online. “Suite 4” and “Ste 4” are different addresses to a machine.
Post real photographs. Profiles with photos get meaningfully more engagement.
Ask satisfied customers for reviews, and reply to every one. Especially the bad ones — everybody reads how you handle those.
Fill in hours, service areas and attributes completely.

A business with a mediocre website and an excellent Business Profile routinely outranks the reverse. If you’re spending money on SEO and this isn’t done, stop and do this first.

Fourth: do you have a page worth ranking?

Google ranks pages, not businesses. If every service you offer shares one “Services” page, you’ve asked one page to compete for a dozen different searches. It will lose all of them.

The fix is structural: one page per thing you want to rank for. A page for AC repair. A page for AC installation. A page for duct cleaning. And if you serve several distinct areas, a real page for each — not the same paragraph with the town name swapped, which Google recognises and discounts.

Each page needs enough substance to be genuinely the best answer to that search. That usually means several hundred words that address the actual question, not two sentences and a call-to-action.

Fifth: the technical basics

Less exciting than people claim, but worth checking:

Every page has its own title tag and meta description. Not the business name repeated eleven times.
One <h1> per page, describing that page.
The site works on a phone. Most local searches happen on one.
It loads quickly. Run it through PageSpeed Insights. If your Largest Contentful Paint is over about 2.5 seconds on mobile, that’s worth fixing — usually it’s images nobody compressed.
HTTPS, with no mixed-content warnings.
A sitemap, submitted in Search Console.

What to ignore

Emails offering to submit you to 500 directories. At best worthless, at worst actively harmful.

Anyone guaranteeing a ranking. Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee is either meaningless small print or a plan to rank you for a phrase nobody searches.

Keyword density. Not a thing, and hasn’t been for over a decade. Write for people.

Buying links. This is against Google’s guidelines and the downside is losing rankings you already have.

How long this takes

Longer than anyone wants to hear. A new site typically takes three to six months to establish itself for anything competitive. Business Profile improvements can show up in weeks. Content compounds slowly and then, if you keep at it, faster.

Anyone promising results next month is describing something other than SEO.

If you’d like a straight read on which of these is your actual problem, we’ll look at your site and your Business Profile and tell you — about fifteen minutes, no charge, and no obligation to hire anyone. Quite often the answer is “your website is fine, fix your Business Profile”, and we’ll say so.