Why isn't my website showing up on Google?

You paid for a website. It's live. You can see it. And when you search for what you do in your town, it's nowhere. Not page one, not page five. Nothing.

It's one of the most common things people ring me about, and it's rarely one big problem. It's usually two or three small ones stacked on top of each other. Here's how to work out which ones are yours.

First, check whether Google knows it exists

There's a difference between Google not ranking your site and Google not knowing about it at all. Work out which one you've got before you do anything else.

The five minute check

Go to Google and type site: followed by your domain, with no space. For example, site:yourbusiness.co.uk. Whatever comes up is roughly what Google has in its index for your site.

• Nothing at all: Google hasn't indexed you. That's the first thing to fix, and it's usually quick.
• Some pages but not others: Google knows you exist but has decided some pages aren't worth keeping yet.
• Every page shows up: you're indexed, you're just not ranking. Different problem, skip to the section on searches further down.

The proper check: Google Search Console

Search Console is Google's free tool for website owners. It tells you exactly which pages are indexed, which aren't, and why. If you've got a website and you're not in Search Console, set it up this week. It's the closest thing you'll get to Google telling you what it thinks of your site.

The page indexing report is where you'll see statuses like 'Discovered, currently not indexed'. That means Google knows the page exists but hasn't bothered to crawl it yet. It sounds alarming. It usually isn't. When I launched this site, my own contact page sat in exactly that state for a while. Nothing was broken. Google just gets round to new sites in its own time.

The usual culprits

The site is brand new

A new site on a new domain can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to appear at all, and months to rank for anything competitive. If your site went live last Tuesday, give it time. Submitting a sitemap in Search Console speeds up the first part.

Nobody has told Google about it

A sitemap is a list of every page on your site, written for search engines. Most modern sites generate one automatically, but it still needs submitting in Search Console. It takes two minutes. A surprising number of sites I look at have never had it done.

The site is telling Google to go away

This one's more common than you'd think. WordPress has a tick box called 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site'. Builders like Squarespace and Wix have similar settings. They get switched on while the site is being built and nobody switches them off at launch. The site looks perfect to you and is invisible to Google.

The pages don't say anything useful

If your services page says 'We offer a wide range of high quality services at competitive prices', so does every other page on the internet. Google has no reason to show yours. Pages that name the actual service, the actual towns and the actual questions customers ask are the ones that get picked up.

The site is slow on a phone

Most local searches happen on a phone. If your site takes six seconds to load on mobile data, Google knows, and so do the people who give up and hit back. Run it through the website speed checker. Anything in the red is worth fixing whatever else is going on.

You might be targeting a search nobody does

This is the one that catches most small businesses out. Your site might be indexed perfectly well and ranking for something. Just not something anyone types.

'Builder Warwickshire' gets hardly any searches. 'Extension builder Coventry' does. 'Accountant Midlands' is a dead end. 'Accountant Northampton' isn't. People search for the service they need in the town they live in, so the pages that win are the ones that name both.

That's why I have separate pages for places like Coventry, Northampton and Banbury rather than one page claiming the whole region. Each town needs its own page with its own reason to exist, not the same text with the name swapped. Google spots copy and paste town pages a mile off.

I'll be honest, this doesn't happen overnight either. Some of my own town pages took weeks to register a single impression after launch. That's normal. The job is to make each one useful and keep going.

The map is a separate race

When someone searches 'plumber near me', the first thing they see is usually a map with three businesses on it. Those come from Google Business Profiles, not websites. You can have a brilliant site and still be missing from the map if you haven't got a profile set up properly.

If you're a local business, the map is often worth more than the normal results. I've written a whole guide on setting up a Google Business Profile properly.

What to fix first

If you've got an afternoon and want to do it yourself, work through this in order:

• Do the site: search. Know whether you're dealing with an indexing problem or a ranking problem.
• Set up Search Console and submit your sitemap.
• Check the 'discourage search engines' setting is off. Takes thirty seconds and occasionally fixes everything.
• Set up or tidy your Google Business Profile.
• Rewrite your key pages to name the service and the town, in the words your customers use.
• Run the speed checker and fix anything glaring.

The first four cost nothing but time. The last two are where a bit of help usually pays for itself.

What not to fall for

• Emails promising 'page one of Google guaranteed'. Nobody can guarantee that. Delete them.
• SEO packages with no reporting. If someone's charging you monthly, you should see what they did and what changed.
• Buying links or reviews. It works right up until it doesn't, and then it can take the whole site down with it.
• Stuffing town names into every sentence. Google stopped falling for that years ago and customers never did.

Want me to take a look?

Send me your web address and I'll tell you what's stopping it showing up. If it's a quick fix you can do yourself, I'll tell you that. If it needs more, the SEO page explains how I work and the audit price is on the pricing page.

Ring me on 07516 124501 or drop me a message. Whether you're in Kenilworth, Coventry or anywhere else in the Midlands, the fixes are the same.