Why isn’t my website showing up on Google?

The five-minute test

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. It lists every page of yours Google has indexed. Three outcomes:

• Nothing. Google has no copy of the site. The problem is indexing, and it is almost always one of causes one to four below.
• Some pages, not all. The site is known but parts of it are not indexed. Search Console’s Pages report will say why, page by page.
• All the pages. The site is indexed. The problem is ranking — causes five to nine — and none of the indexing fixes will help.

Owners spend months on the wrong half of this list. Five minutes on the test saves them.

If it is not indexed: the four usual causes

1. It is new and nobody told Google. A site with no links to it and no Search Console property can sit unnoticed for weeks. Add the property, submit the sitemap, request indexing on the main pages, and get the Business Profile linking to it. Then wait days, not hours.
2. A noindex tag. Look in the page source for <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. Developers add it to keep a site-in-progress out of Google and forget to remove it at launch — it is the single most common reason a brand-new site is invisible. WordPress has it as a checkbox called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”
3. A robots.txt block. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * tells every crawler to stay out. Same origin as above, same fix.
4. Google saw it and chose not to index it. Search Console’s Pages report says “Discovered — currently not indexed” or “Crawled — currently not indexed.” That is Google saying the page did not seem worth the space: thin, duplicated, or on a site with no signals yet. The fix is the content and the prominence work below, not a resubmission.

If it is indexed but nobody finds it: the five usual causes

5. The pages are not about what people search. A home page that says “Quality service since 2011” and nothing else cannot rank for “water heater replacement Murfreesboro.” Every service needs its own page, titled and written for the search, and every city you want needs one too.
6. The pages are thin. Two hundred words and a phone number is not a better answer than the competitor’s page with the process, the timeline, the warranty and the FAQ. Google ranks the better answer.
7. It is slow or broken on a phone. Most local searches happen on one. A page that takes five seconds to become usable, or whose buttons are unreachable, ranks below the one that works. Google’s Core Web Vitals are the published thresholds; the free scan measures them.
8. The business is not prominent yet. Few reviews, listings that disagree, no mentions anywhere. The businesses above you have been building that for years. It is the slow part, and it is the map pack post.
9. It is being searched from the wrong place. You search from the office and rank; the customer searches from ten miles away and you are gone. Distance decides the map pack. Check from the customer’s side with a geo-grid before deciding there is a problem at all.

The rare cause: a manual action

Search Console → Security & Manual Actions. If it shows a manual action, Google has had a person look at the site and found it breaking a spam policy — bought links, hidden text, hacked pages, thin doorway pages. The report says which. The repair is to fix exactly that, document it, and file a reconsideration request. It is rare for a legitimate local business, and if the report is empty, a penalty is not your problem, whatever a cold-calling agency tells you.

The order to fix things in

Indexing first — nothing else matters until Google has the pages. Then the pages themselves: one per service, one per city, each a real answer, fast on a phone. Then prominence: the profile, the reviews, the listings. Then patience, measured against a monthly check of positions from where the customers are, not a daily refresh from the desk.

And a caution about timelines: an indexing fix shows in days; a content fix in weeks; a prominence fix in months. The honest SEO timeline is its own post, because “it has been two weeks and nothing happened” is the most common reason owners abandon work that was about to pay off.