Your website is not
showing on Google.

Check whether Google has it at all

Before diagnosing anything, find out if Google knows your site exists. Search for site:yourdomain.com (no space after the colon). That returns every page of yours Google has indexed.

If it returns nothing, your site is not indexed and the problem is technical. If it returns pages, your site is indexed and the problem is ranking, which is a completely different fix. Most people conflate these two and spend months solving the wrong one.

If nothing comes back

• The site is new. Give it two to four weeks. Nothing is wrong.
• It is blocked by robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / you are telling Google to stay out. This is the most common cause and it usually happens when a developer forgets to remove the staging block at launch.
• It carries a noindex tag. Same cause, different mechanism. A leftover from development that nobody removed.
• There is no sitemap and nothing links to you. Google finds pages by following links. A brand new site nobody links to and with no sitemap submitted can sit undiscovered for a long time.
• It was built in a way Google cannot read. Rare now, but sites built entirely in JavaScript with no server-rendered content still cause this.

If your pages are there but nobody finds you

This is the more common and more frustrating case. You are in the index, you just are not ranking for anything anyone types.

Almost always it is one of these three, and almost always it is the first.

• Your pages do not say what people search. A page headed "Welcome to our website" targets nothing. If a customer types "emergency plumber winnipeg", some page of yours has to be visibly about being an emergency plumber in Winnipeg.
• Nothing links to you. Links are still how Google judges whether a site is worth showing. A site with zero links from anywhere is a site with no evidence behind it.
• Someone else is simply more established. If the top three results have been in business fifteen years with a hundred reviews each, you do not beat them on that query this year. You beat them on the queries they ignore.

The map is a separate thing entirely

If you want to appear in the map box at the top of local searches, that is not your website at all. That is a Google Business Profile, which is a separate free listing you claim and verify. A business can rank well organically and be completely absent from the map, or the reverse.

If you are missing from the map, the profile is almost always either unclaimed or unverified. An unverified profile does not appear to anyone.

What we would tell you on the phone

Most small businesses do not have an SEO problem. They have a nobody-has-touched-this-since-2019 problem. The site is slow, the copy is about the business rather than the customer, and nothing has been added in years. Google is reading that accurately.

If you want us to look, send the URL. We will tell you which of the six it is, for free, and if the answer is "nothing, just wait three weeks" we will tell you that too. See how a redesign works if it turns out the site itself is the problem.