Why is my website not showing up on Google?

If the site: search returns nothing

Google does not know your website exists, or has decided not to keep it. That is a small number of causes and most of them are quick.

The commonest by a distance is a brand new site. Google has to find you, crawl you and decide you are worth storing, and on a domain with nothing pointing at it that can take days or weeks. The fix is to stop waiting passively: set up Google Search Console, verify the site, submit your sitemap, then use URL Inspection to request indexing on your most important pages.

The second commonest is that the site is telling Google to go away, usually by accident. A noindex tag left in place from when the site was being built will do it, and so will a robots.txt file that disallows everything. Both are invisible on the page itself, which is why people stare at a perfectly good website wondering what is wrong with it. Search Console reports both in plain English under Pages.

The third is that the site is not really a set of pages at all. Some builders and some single-page designs load their content with JavaScript after the fact, and a shop platform or booking tool on a subdomain can end up outside the site Google has indexed. If the words on your page do not exist in the page source, expect trouble.

If the site: search returns results

Then you are indexed, and this is about position rather than existence. Position is decided by relevance to the search, by how trustworthy the domain looks, and by how much competition there is for that phrase. Most small business owners have a problem with the first of those and blame the second.

Start with what you are actually trying to rank for. Most people test themselves on their own business name, find themselves at the top, and conclude the site works. Searching your own name proves nothing: nobody who has not heard of you will ever type it. The searches that matter are the ones a stranger uses, which almost always take the form of a service and a place.

Then check whether your site says those words anywhere. A surprising number of trade websites never state plainly what they do and where. A homepage headed Welcome, followed by a paragraph about quality and reliability, gives Google nothing to match against a search for an electrician in a named town.

The seven usual causes, in the order worth checking

1. The site is too new and has never been submitted. Fix: Search Console, sitemap, request indexing.

2. A noindex tag or a blocking robots.txt is still in place from the build. Fix: remove it, then request indexing.

3. You are only testing your own business name. Fix: test the service-and-town phrases a stranger would use.

4. The pages do not say what you do or where you do it. Fix: write it plainly in the page title, the first heading and the opening sentence.

5. There is one page trying to cover everything. Fix: a page per service, and a page per area you genuinely cover, each with something real on it.

6. There is no Google Business Profile. For anything local this is usually the single biggest gap, because the map results sit above the ordinary results and are fed by the profile, not by the website.

7. Nothing links to you. A domain with no inbound links looks to Google like a domain nobody has vouched for. Fix: suppliers, trade bodies, local directories, the people whose work you have done.

What will not fix it

Buying backlinks. They are detectable, they are against Google's guidelines, and the cheap ones come from the same few networks every buyer uses. The downside is not theoretical.

Keyword stuffing. Repeating plumber in Exeter forty times in a footer stopped working many years ago and now reads as spam to both the algorithm and the customer.

Paying a monthly fee for a report. Plenty of SEO retainers deliver a PDF full of graphs and no actual changes to the website. Ask what will be edited, on which page, this month.

Blogging without a reason. A weekly post about industry news does nothing for a business whose customers search for a service and a town. Answer the questions your customers actually ask instead.

How long any of this takes

Indexing, once it is requested and nothing is blocking it, is usually days rather than weeks. Position is slower. On a young domain, expect movement over one to three months and be suspicious of anybody who promises a date.

Nobody can guarantee a position on Google, including the people who tell you they can. What is controllable is whether you are indexed, whether your pages say what you do, whether the business profile exists, and whether anything links to you. Get those four right and the rest is patience.