Why is my website not showing up on Google?

In most cases it is one of two things. Either Google has not indexed the site at all, or there is no page on it that is genuinely about the thing people are typing. Backlinks, schema, keyword density and whatever your last agency put in a report are a long way down the list.

Below is the diagnostic I run before I quote on any SEO job. It takes about twenty minutes, you can do all of it yourself in a browser, and it goes in this order for a reason: if check one fails, checks two through eight are a waste of your afternoon.

1. Is the site indexed at all?

Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. If you get pages back, you are indexed and you can move to check two. If you get nothing, you have found your problem and it is almost always fixable in a day.

Confirm it properly in Search Console. Paste a URL into the inspection bar at the top and it will tell you either "URL is on Google" or "URL is not on Google", plus the reason. That reason is usually one of four things.

• A noindex tag. One line in the page's head telling Google to stay away. On WordPress it is often the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" tickbox in Settings → Reading, left on from the build.
• robots.txt blocking everything. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under a wildcard user-agent, that is the whole site closed off.
• A staging site still live. Developers build on staging.yourdomain.co.uk with indexing switched off, then push to the live domain and forget which settings travelled with it.
• Two versions of you competing. An old site left running on a second domain, or a.com and a.co.uk serving identical content. Google picks one, and it is rarely the one you care about.

Remove the block, then use the "Request indexing" button in Search Console for your five most important pages. New pages typically appear within a few days to a fortnight, not hours. Anyone promising same-day indexing is selling you something Google does not sell.

2. Is the site simply too new?

This is the answer nobody wants and it is often the correct one. A new domain with real content gets indexed inside a fortnight, but indexed is not the same as visible. Being on page seven for your main term is normal at week three.

Rough honest timelines, assuming the site is decent and someone is actually working on it: four to twelve weeks to start ranking for low-competition local terms in a small town, three to nine months to reach page one for a competitive service term in a city, and twelve months or never for something like "plumber london". Those ranges shift with your market, so treat them as shape rather than promise.

Here is the unprofitable bit. If you need enquiries next month to pay wages, SEO is the wrong channel and I will tell you so on the call. Put £300 to £600 a month into Google Ads or Local Services Ads, get the phone ringing, and run SEO alongside as the six-month project it is. Buying SEO as an emergency measure is how people end up angry six weeks later.

3. Are you searching in a way that flatters you?

Plenty of "we've vanished from Google" panics turn out to be search behaviour, not rankings. Google personalises heavily by location, device and history. Sitting in your own unit, on your own wifi, searching your own business name is the most flattering test available and it tells you nothing.

Three ways people fool themselves. Searching the brand name, which you will always rank for and which nobody who does not know you will ever type. Searching from inside the town whose name is in the query, where the map pack behaves completely differently to five miles out. And using incognito, which strips your history but keeps your IP address, so location still applies.

The honest number lives in Search Console → Performance. Switch on the "Average position" tick, set the date range to the last three months, and read the queries table. That is what real people typed and where you sat when they did. If a query you care about is not in that table at all, you are not on page ten for it. You are nowhere for it, and check four explains why.

4. Is there a page that targets the query at all?

This is the most common real cause I find, by a wide margin. Google ranks pages, not businesses. If no page on your site is about resin driveways in Tunbridge Wells, no amount of technical work will make you rank for resin driveways in Tunbridge Wells.

Most small-business sites have five pages: Home, About, Services, Gallery, Contact. The Services page lists eleven things in a bulleted column. That page is about nothing in particular, so it competes for nothing in particular, while a rival with one 800-word page per service quietly takes the lot.

The check takes four minutes. Write down the ten things a customer would actually type to find you. Next to each, name the exact URL on your site that answers it. Every line where you cannot name a URL is a page that needs to exist.

If you cannot name the page, Google cannot rank the page. Missing pages, not weak pages, are what keeps most small sites invisible.

Build them properly: 600 to 900 words, written by someone who has done the job, with prices or price ranges, photographs of your own work, and the specifics only you know. One caveat worth taking seriously. Forty near-identical town pages with the place name swapped is a recognised spam pattern and it can hurt you. Write pages for the three to six places you genuinely serve and leave it there. The local SEO checklist goes through the order to do this in.

5. Does the page type match what the searcher wants?

You can have a page on the topic and still lose because it is the wrong kind of page. Google has decided, from billions of clicks, what format satisfies each query. Bring a blog post to a service-page fight and you lose regardless of quality.

Checking this costs nothing. Search your target query and look at what the first ten results actually are, ignoring who they belong to. If eight of ten are guides, your service page will not break in and you need a guide. If eight of ten are service pages, stop writing blog posts about the topic and build the service page.

6. Is the competition simply stronger than you?

Sometimes the site is fine, the page exists, the intent matches, and you are still on page three because the businesses above you are further along. Judging that honestly is the difference between a plan and a fantasy.

Search your term and open the first five results. For each one, note who owns it, how long the page is, how many Google reviews the business has, how many other pages on the site cover related topics, and roughly how long the domain has existed. You are looking for whether these are beatable neighbours or national machinery.

If the top five are Checkatrade, MyBuilder, a directory and two firms with 300 reviews and fifteen years of domain history, you are not taking that term this year with a six-page site. That is not defeat, it is targeting. Broad terms carry the volume and the fight; narrower ones carry the intent. "Flat roof repair Tonbridge" might see a fraction of the searches that "roofer kent" does, while converting several times better because the person typing it has a specific wet ceiling. Check your own numbers rather than trusting mine, because volume varies enormously by region.

And occasionally the right answer is not a website job at all. For a single-van trade working a five-mile radius, thirty genuine Google reviews and a properly filled-in Google Business Profile will out-earn anything I could charge you for content. I would rather say that than take the money.

7. Technical brakes

Technical problems rarely make an otherwise good page invisible. What they do is hold it a few positions below where it should sit, and occasionally one of them is catastrophic. Worth ten minutes, not worth a £4,000 audit.

• Speed. Run the page through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab only. Aim for largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds. A page taking six seconds on 4G is losing customers before it loses rankings, more on that here.
• Mobile usability. Over two-thirds of local service searches happen on a phone. Text you have to pinch to read, or a form with fields that vanish off the side, is a ranking problem and a conversion problem at once.
• Thin content. A 90-word page with a stock photo has nothing to rank with. This is not a word-count rule; it is that 90 words cannot answer a question.
• Duplicate pages and titles. Eight pages sharing one title tag, or a shop generating a dozen URLs for the same product. Google picks one and it may not be yours.
• Broken canonical tags. The genuinely dangerous one. After a rebuild I have seen every page on a site canonical-tagged to the homepage, which tells Google the other pages are duplicates and should be ignored. One line of code, most of a site's visibility gone.
• Orphan pages. If a page is only reachable via the sitemap and nothing on your site links to it, Google reads that as unimportant. Try to reach every key page in two clicks from the homepage.

Check the canonical tags first. It is the only item on that list that can single-handedly cause the symptom you searched for.

8. A penalty, or a bad-links history

People assume this one and it is the rarest. Open Search Console → Security & Manual Actions. If it says "No issues detected", you do not have a penalty, and you can stop paying anyone to talk about one.

The more realistic version is inherited damage. A previous "SEO guy" on £99 a month bought 5,000 directory and forum links, or filled the site with spun content, or the domain was used for something unsavoury before you bought it. Google's spam systems now discount most junk links automatically, so the disavow tool is a last resort with a documented manual action, not routine hygiene.

Two things worth checking. Look your domain up on the Wayback Machine to see what it was before you owned it. And read your old content with fresh eyes for pages that were written for a keyword rather than a customer. If the domain has a genuinely dirty history and you have spent two years getting nowhere, starting again on a clean domain with proper redirects is sometimes the cheaper answer. That advice costs me work and it is still true.

The two-week plan for the most likely cause

Assume you got through checks one to three cleanly and stalled at four, because that is where most people stall. Here is what the fortnight looks like.

1. Days 1 to 2. Verify Search Console. Export the queries report. Write your list of ten customer queries and map each one to a URL, marking the gaps.
2. Days 3 to 4. Search your three biggest gaps and note the page type that ranks. Decide whether each gap needs a service page or a guide.
3. Days 5 to 9. Write those three pages. 600 to 900 words each, your own prices, your own photographs, the questions customers ask you on the phone answered in plain words.
4. Days 10 to 11. Link to each new page from the homepage and the main navigation, from any related page, and from each other where it makes sense. No page should be an island.
5. Day 12. Submit each URL in Search Console, then put a reminder in the diary for eight weeks out.

At the eight-week check, compare the average position for those queries against your export. Movement from nowhere into the 20s or 30s is a healthy first signal, and page one commonly takes another few months. If twelve weeks bring no movement at all, one of two things is true: the page is not good enough, or the term is too hard for you right now. Fix whichever it is rather than writing a fourth page and hoping.

Three questions I get asked every time

How do I check whether Google has indexed my website?

Search site:yourdomain.co.uk in Google. If nothing comes back, the site is not indexed. Then confirm it in Google Search Console using URL Inspection, which tells you plainly whether a URL is on Google and why it is not.

How long does a new website take to show up on Google?

Indexing usually takes a few days to a fortnight once the site is crawlable. Ranking anywhere useful for a competitive commercial term typically takes three to nine months, and low-competition local terms can move in four to twelve weeks.

Why does my site show up when I search but not when customers do?

Google personalises results by location, search history and device. Sitting in your own premises searching your own brand name flatters you badly. The honest number is the average position in the Search Console performance report, for the queries customers actually type.

That is the whole method, and most of it you can do without hiring anyone. If you would rather not, SEO is what I do, usually alongside a rebuild, and the process page sets out how a job runs from start to finish. Either way, run the twenty minutes first. Knowing which of the eight it is turns a vague worry into a job with an end.

If you are in a specific trade, the diagnosis narrows quickly. Trades and emergency call-outs behave differently from everything else, covered in local SEO for trades. Regulated firms have constraints on what they can claim, which changes the content answer rather than the technical one, and that is in websites for regulated firms.