You've launched a website, searched for your business, and it isn't there. Or it's there for your own name but nowhere for the thing you actually sell.
The cause is usually one of a short list. Some take five minutes to fix. Others take months of work. The trick is working out which you've got before you spend money on the wrong one.
First, check whether Google knows the site exists
Type this into Google, with your own domain:
site:yourbusiness.co.uk
If nothing comes back, Google hasn't indexed the site at all. That's a technical problem, and it's usually the quick kind. Skip to the next section.
If pages come back, Google knows about you and is choosing not to rank you for the searches you care about. That's a different problem, and it's further down.
If Google can't see the site at all
It's new
A brand new domain can take anything from a few days to a few weeks to appear. You can speed it up by adding the site to Google Search Console and submitting your sitemap. If you do nothing else on this list, do that. It's free, and it's where Google tells you what's wrong.
It's telling Google to stay away
More common than you'd think, especially after a launch. Developers often block search engines while a site is being built, and the setting doesn't always get switched off. Look for:
- a
noindextag in the page source - a
robots.txtfile that saysDisallow: / - a WordPress setting called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site", still ticked
Any one of those will keep you out of Google entirely, however good the site is.
Google can't read it
Some sites build everything in the browser with JavaScript and send search engines an almost empty page. Google copes with this better than it used to, but not always, and many AI search tools don't run JavaScript at all. If your page source (right-click, View Page Source) doesn't contain your actual text, that's worth raising with whoever built it.
If Google sees the site but won't rank it
This is the more usual situation, and the longer job.
There's no page for what you're searching
If you want to be found for "kitchen fitter Leicester", you need a page that is clearly and specifically about kitchen fitting in Leicester. One services page listing twelve things won't rank for any of them. It's a very common gap, and one of the most fixable.
The competition is simply stronger
For a search like "web design Leicester", the businesses on page one have usually been building their position for years: links from other sites, reviews, lots of relevant pages. A new site doesn't overtake them in a month. It can overtake them, but it's a campaign, not a switch.
The site is slow, especially on a phone
Speed is a ranking factor, and more to the point, slow sites lose visitors before they've read anything. We've written about why websites feel slow and what it costs.
Your Google Business Profile is missing or inconsistent
For local searches, the map results at the top come mostly from your Business Profile, not your website. If it's unclaimed, or the address and phone number don't match your site, you're giving away the most visible spot on the page. There's more on this in why your Google Business Profile isn't showing.
Nobody else mentions you
Google judges how established a business is partly by who links to it and talks about it: local press, directories, suppliers, trade bodies. A site with no links from anywhere looks, to Google, like a site nobody vouches for.
What to do next
- Run the
site:search above. - Set up Search Console and submit your sitemap.
- Check for
noindexand a blockingrobots.txt. - Make sure every service you want to be found for has its own page.
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
If you've done all five and you're still invisible, it's time for a proper look. Our website audit covers the crawl, Search Console, speed on a real phone and the pages people land on, and you keep the prioritised list whether or not you work with us.
And if you're in the East Midlands or West Yorkshire, there's more on how we approach SEO in Leicester and SEO in Huddersfield.
