Why is my website not showing up on Google?

Four causes cover nearly every case: the site is too new, something is blocking it, it is actually indexed but ranked below where you are looking, or you are looking at the map results and have no Business Profile. Only the third is about SEO, and it is the one everyone assumes it is.

Work through them in order. It takes about ten minutes and it will tell you which problem you have.

Check one: is your site indexed at all?

Search Google for site: followed by your domain, with no space. For example site:yourbusiness.com.

• Results appear. Your site is indexed. Skip to check three, because your problem is ranking, not indexing.
• Nothing appears. Google does not have your site. Continue to check two.

This single search separates two completely different problems that get treated as one, and it costs nothing.

Check two: is it too new, or is something blocking it?

Too new is the most common answer for a site launched in the last month. Google’s own documentation says plainly that “it can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site, or any changes in your existing site.” A new domain with nothing linking to it sits at the slow end of that.

Google’s guidance lists the reasons a site does not appear, and the first is that “your site isn’t linked to by other sites on the web.” A brand new domain with no links is exactly that situation. The others are that the site is hard to crawl, that Google got an error trying, or simply that it was missed.

If the site is more than a month old, look for something blocking it. In rough order of how often each is the culprit:

The fastest check for the first three: open your site in a private or incognito window. If you see a login screen, so does Google. Then add your site to Google Search Console, which is free, and use URL Inspection on your home page. It will tell you directly whether the page is indexed and, if not, why.

If you had a website before and the new one is at a different address, the old address needs to redirect to the new one. Losing an indexed page in silence is a real cost and nobody notices it for months.

Check three: are you searching for something you were never going to rank for?

This is where most of the disappointment lives, and it is usually a measurement error rather than a website problem.

Two things are worth separating:

Searching your own business name. If your site does not appear for your exact business name, you have an indexing problem, and you are back at check two.

Searching a competitive phrase. If you type “plumber Chicago” and expect to be on page one after three weeks, the site is not broken. That phrase is held by businesses with years of history and links. A new site does not take it, and no amount of content will change that quickly.

⚠️ Also, you are not seeing what your customers see. Google personalizes results using your location and your history, and you visit your own site constantly. Check from a private window, or ask someone in another town.

What a new site can realistically reach is specific, longer phrases where the competition is thin. That works on a timescale of three to six months, not three weeks, and it is why nobody can honestly promise you a position. The timing of all of this is covered in how long it takes to build a website.

Check four: are you looking at the map, and do you have a profile?

If your complaint is that you do not appear on the map, or in the block of local businesses at the top of the results, that is a different system and your website is not what feeds it.

Those results come from Google Business Profile, which is free and separate from your site. You can have a perfect website and be entirely absent from the map, and you can be prominent on the map with no website at all.

This is the highest-return fix on this page for any local business, and it is free. The full procedure, including the verification step that trips people up, is in how to get your business on Google Maps.

One eligibility point before you count on it: Google requires in-person contact with customers. A business qualifies if it has a location customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are. A rented mailing address you do not work from is explicitly not eligible.

What actually moves the needle, in order?

Once the site is indexed and the blockers are gone, five things, in the order that returns the most for the least effort.

1. Google Business Profile, complete and verified. Free, and it is what local searches actually use.
2. The same contact details everywhere. Name, address and phone identical on your site, your profile and any directory. Inconsistent details are one of the quietest ways to hold yourself back.
3. Real reviews, gathered continuously. Not a burst once a year. How to get more Google reviews covers the rules, which are stricter than most people realize.
4. Pages that answer specific questions, in the words customers actually use. What you charge, what areas you cover, what is included.
5. Links from real places. Suppliers, local associations, a directory that a human curates. Google’s own guidance names the absence of these as a reason a site does not appear.

🛑 What does not work: buying links, and paying for a guaranteed position. Nobody controls Google’s ranking, so nobody can guarantee one. An offer that promises a position is either misinformed or dishonest, and there is no third option.

What I do and do not do about this

The templates I build are made to be readable by search engines: real text in the page rather than injected afterward, sensible headings, a page title on every page, and alt text on every image. WordPress generates the sitemap itself.

What the template does not give you is a meta description, the sentence Google sometimes shows under your title. That needs an SEO plugin, which is free and takes ten minutes to install, and I do not ship one with the template. I would rather tell you that here than let you assume it is handled. Writing the alt text is part of placing the content, so it follows whoever does that: me on the two packages where I build the site, you on the EUR 490 one (coming soon).

What is not in the package: ongoing SEO, ranking work, link building, and above all any promise about your position. Nobody can guarantee a ranking, so an offer of one is a reason to end the conversation rather than a reason to sign.

What you can do the same afternoon, for nothing: set up Search Console, set up your Business Profile, and check your site in an incognito window. Those three cover the majority of “my site is invisible” cases, and none of them requires hiring anybody.

See what the packages include