Why Isn’t My Website Showing Up on Google? 10 Reasons and Fixes

You search for your business on Google and your website is nowhere to be seen. It’s one of the most common things people ask us about, and the cause is usually one of a handful of problems, most of which you can check in a few minutes. Here’s how to work out which one you have and what to do about it.

First, check whether Google knows your site exists

Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google, using your own domain with no spaces. This shows the pages Google has indexed from your site.

• Nothing comes up: Google hasn’t indexed your site. Start with reasons 1 to 3.
• Your pages come up: Google knows about your site, but you aren’t ranking for the searches you care about. Skip to reason 4.

1. The site is new

Google has to discover a new website before it can show it, which can take anything from a few days to a few weeks. You can speed this up by adding the site to Search Console, submitting your sitemap (on WordPress, your SEO plugin usually creates one for you) and using the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your main pages.

2. The site is telling Google to stay away

This happens more often than you’d think, especially with new WordPress sites. Developers often hide a site from search engines while they build it, and the setting gets left on at launch. Check that:

• In WordPress, under Settings › Reading, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not ticked.
• Your robots.txt file (yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt) doesn’t contain a line that just says “Disallow: /”.
• Your important pages don’t have a “noindex” tag. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console will tell you if a page is blocked by one.

3. Google can’t reach or read your pages

Server errors, pages behind a login, broken redirects or content that only loads through complicated scripts can all stop Google indexing a site. The Pages report in Search Console lists the pages Google couldn’t index and the reason for each, which usually points straight at the problem.

4. You’re showing up, just not where you’re looking

If you can find your site by searching for your business name, Google has it. The real question is whether you appear when customers search for what you do, such as “roofer in Merthyr”. Your own searches are also influenced by where you are and what you’ve searched before, so they aren’t a reliable test. The Performance report in Search Console shows the searches you really appear for and your average position, even if that’s page four for now.

5. Your pages don’t say what you do

Google ranks pages for what’s on them. A homepage titled “Home” that says “Welcome to our website” gives it nothing to work with. Each important page needs a title and main heading that say what you do and where, like “Emergency Plumber in Bridgend”, and enough helpful text to back it up.

6. Thin or copied content

A page with two sentences, text copied from a supplier’s website, or ten area pages with only the town name changed is unlikely to rank. Google wants to show the most useful page for each search, so write for your customers: what you offer, what affects the price, how the process works and the questions people ask you on the phone.

7. Your competitors are stronger

For some searches, you’re up against businesses with fifteen-year-old websites, hundreds of reviews and links from all over the web. A new site won’t overtake them in a month. Start with more specific searches you can win, such as a service plus a smaller town, and build from there. Our guide to how long SEO takes explains what to expect.

8. You’re missing from Google Maps

If the problem is the map results rather than the normal listings, your website may not be the issue. The map results come from your Google Business Profile. Check that you have one, that it’s verified, that it uses the right category and service areas, and that you’re collecting reviews. Our local SEO checklist goes through it step by step.

9. You changed website and lost your rankings

If traffic dropped after a new website went live, the old page addresses were probably not redirected to the new ones. Google still has the old addresses, visitors land on “page not found”, and the rankings those pages had built up are lost. Setting up 301 redirects from each old address to its closest new page can win much of that back, especially if it’s done quickly.

10. A penalty or a hacked site

This is rare, but worth ruling out. The Security & Manual Actions section of Search Console shows whether Google has taken action against your site, for example over bought links, or whether hackers have added spam pages to it. If anything shows up there, deal with it before anything else.

How long until it shows up?

Once the blocking problems are fixed, a site usually starts appearing within days or weeks. Ranking well for competitive searches takes longer, typically three to six months of steady work.