Why is my website not showing up on Google?

Before doing anything, find out which of two completely different problems you have. Either Google does not know your site exists, or it knows perfectly well and is putting other people first. They feel identical and they have nothing in common. One is usually a five-minute fix; the other is months of ordinary work.

The one-minute test

Search for this, exactly, including the colon and with no space after it:

site:yourdomain.co.uk

That asks Google to list only pages it holds from your site.

• Results appear — you are indexed. Skip to the second half; this is a ranking problem.
• Nothing appears — you are not indexed. Read the next section; something is blocking it.

Do the same for a specific page you care about: site:yourdomain.co.uk/services. It is common to have the homepage indexed and individual pages not.

If you are not indexed at all

Roughly in order of likelihood.

The site is genuinely new

A brand-new site takes days to weeks to appear. There is no fee to skip this and nobody can. If it went live last Tuesday, wait.

It is telling Google not to index it

The commonest real cause, and almost always an accident. Site builders have a "discourage search engines" or "hide from search" setting that gets switched on during building and never switched off.

Two things to check:

• Your robots.txt — visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks everything.
• A noindex tag. Open your homepage, view the page source, and search it for noindex. If it is there, find the setting that put it there.

These two account for a very large share of "we are invisible" cases and both are switches.

Google cannot reach it

A password-protected staging site, a broken certificate, or a server that was down when it tried. Open your site in a private browsing window on mobile data — if you cannot see it while logged out, neither can Google.

Nothing links to it and you never told anyone

Google finds pages by following links. A new site with no inbound links and no sitemap can sit unnoticed. Submit a sitemap through Search Console, and get at least one real link — your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, a supplier's page.

It was penalised

Rare, and it does not happen to ordinary small business sites by accident. If you bought links or the site was previously used for something else, check Search Console for a manual action notice.

If you are indexed but nobody finds you

This is the more common situation and the more frustrating, because everything looks fine.

You are searching for something nobody types

Start here, because it is frequently the whole answer. Searching your own business name and finding yourself proves nothing — of course you rank for your own name. The question is whether you appear for what people type when they do not know you exist.

Search the service and the place — "electrician Otley", not "Otley Electrical Services Ltd". That is the search that matters.

Your pages are not about anything specific

A homepage listing nine services competes for none of them. One page per service you want, in the words customers use, is the single biggest change most small sites can make. How to write one.

You are looking at the wrong contest

For a local business the map results matter far more than the blue links, and they are decided differently — distance, relevance and prominence rather than page content. If you are not in the map box, that is a separate job and usually a more valuable one.

Your details disagree across the web

Different phone numbers or addresses on your site, your listing and old directories weaken everything. An afternoon reconciling them is dull and effective.

There is very little to rank

A five-page site competing with businesses that have answered fifty customer questions will lose, and no amount of tweaking changes it. That is not a trick — it is the honest cost of the thing, and it is why the answer takes months.

What to check, in order

1. site:yourdomain.co.uk — indexed or not.
2. robots.txt and noindex if not indexed.
3. Load the site logged out, on a phone.
4. Set up Search Console and submit your sitemap. It is free and it turns guessing into reading.
5. Search the service and the place, not your name.
6. Check the map results separately from the ordinary ones.
7. Then the slow work: a page per service, consistent details, reviews, and answers to real questions.

What not to do

• Do not buy a "get indexed instantly" service. Submitting a sitemap is free and is the same thing.
• Do not rebuild the site because it is invisible. If a switch is set wrong, a new site sets it wrong too.
• Do not buy links. It is the one thing that can turn a ranking problem into a penalty.
• Do not judge from your own phone at your own premises. You are logged in, you have visited before, and you are standing at the address. Use a private window and ask someone across town.

The bottom line

Run site:yourdomain.co.uk first. Nothing back means something is blocking you, and it is usually a noindex setting or robots.txt left on from building. Results back means you are competing and losing, which is a different job: one page per service, consistent details, the map results, and answering real questions over months. And stop searching your own business name — of course you are there. See also getting found on Google.