Why your website is not showing up on Google

There are only three real possibilities. Google has not indexed your site, or it has indexed it and you rank below where anyone looks, or you are checking a search you were never going to win. Everything below sorts out which.

This is written from having had the problem. Our own site scored well on every technical measure and still sat past position 21 on a local search grid, and the cause turned out to be none of the things that get blamed most often.

Check this first, it takes ten seconds

Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk, with your own domain and no space after the colon.

• Pages come back: you are indexed. Skip to the ranking half of this page.
• Nothing comes back: Google does not have your site. That is a different and more urgent problem, covered next.

Do not judge this by searching your business name in a browser you are signed into. Google personalises results, and your own site will look like it ranks far better than it does.

If you are not indexed

1. The site is too new. Days to a few weeks is normal. Nothing is wrong.

2. Nothing links to it and it is in no sitemap. Google finds pages by following links. A brand new site with no inbound links and no submitted sitemap can sit unnoticed for a long time. Set up Search Console, free, and submit your sitemap.

3. You are blocking Google. Check yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt for a line saying Disallow: /, and view the page source for noindex. This is more common than it sounds, because staging sites are built blocked and somebody forgets to unblock at launch. It is also the single most expensive five-minute mistake in this list.

4. The content only exists in JavaScript. If the page is empty until several scripts finish, some crawlers see an empty page. Less common than it used to be, but it still happens on template builders with heavy plugins.

If you are indexed but nobody finds you

This is the usual case, and it is where most advice goes wrong by blaming the website.

5. You are checking a search you cannot win yet. "Web designer London" is contested by firms with fifteen years of links. A new site will not rank for it, and no amount of on-page work changes that this year. The winnable version is narrower and local.

6. Your site never says where you are. This was our own problem, and it is worth being specific because it is easy to miss. The site claimed London, and the UK, and remote work worldwide, and made no specific local claim anywhere. Google had nowhere to place it. Naming the actual areas you serve, on pages about those areas, is what fixed it.

7. Your Google Business Profile is doing nothing. For most local searches the map results sit above everything and take a large share of the clicks. If your profile hides its address, has a vague service area or has almost no reviews, you are invisible in the part of the page that matters most, no matter how good the website is.

8. Nothing anywhere else mentions you. Search your exact business name. If nothing comes back except your own site, you have no third-party presence at all, and that is a prominence problem rather than a website problem. Directory listings and reviews are what fix it, not another page.

9. The page does not answer the search. A services page and a question are different things. Someone searching how much something costs wants a number, and a page that says "contact us for a quote" does not answer them, so it does not rank for them.

The free tools that tell you which one it is

The order worth working in

1. Confirm you are indexed. Nothing else matters until you are.
2. Fix the Google Business Profile. Address, service area, categories, reviews.
3. Get listed somewhere other than your own site.
4. Make sure the site names the places you actually serve.
5. Ask for reviews, continuously.
6. Only then worry about the pages themselves.

Most people do that list backwards, starting with the website because it is the part they can see, and it is the part that moves last.

The honest timescale

Indexing takes days to weeks. Map results move in roughly four to twelve weeks once the profile is fixed and reviews start arriving. Ranking organically for local service terms takes three to six months on a newer domain.

If someone offers page one in a fortnight, ask which search term. The answer is usually one nobody types.

Related: our study of how 10,862 London businesses actually appear online, and what we found about websites and Google reviews.

Questions about this study