Why Isn't My Website Showing Up on Google?

This is the question we get asked more than any other, and it's usually asked with a particular kind of frustration — the site was paid for, it looks fine, it's been live for months, and it may as well not exist.

Before anything else, it's worth separating two completely different problems that get described with the same sentence. Either Google doesn't have your pages at all, or it has them and is choosing to rank other people above you. The fixes have almost nothing in common, so guessing wastes months.

Thirty seconds to find out which one you've got

Go to Google and search for site:yourdomain.co.uk, using your own domain. That asks Google to show you every page it holds from your site.

Count what comes back. If it's zero, Google doesn't know you exist. If it's two or three pages when your site has thirty, you've got an indexing problem — and that is the single most common situation we find. If everything is listed, your pages are in and the problem is ranking, which is a different article.

The status nobody tells small businesses about

If you have Google Search Console connected — and if you don't, that's the first free thing to fix — open the Pages report and look at the reasons pages aren't indexed. On a large share of small business sites, you'll find a chunk of them sitting under "Discovered — currently not indexed".

That phrase is doing a lot of quiet work. It means Google found the URL, looked at what it knew about your site, and decided the page wasn't worth the effort of crawling. It isn't a penalty and it isn't an error. It's an assessment.

Not indexed is not the same as not ranking. A page that isn't indexed cannot rank for anything at all, no matter how good the content on it is.

We audited a site recently where Google had found forty-one pages and indexed nine. The owner had been paying for SEO work on pages that were never in the race. Nothing on those pages could ever have worked.

Why Google decides a page isn't worth it

Four causes account for almost all of it, in roughly this order:

• Near-identical pages. This is the big one. If your service area pages are the same three paragraphs with the town name swapped, Google reads them as one page repeated eleven times and keeps one. Location pages need genuinely different content — the jobs you actually do there, not a find-and-replace.
• Thin pages. A page with a heading, two sentences and a contact form isn't an answer to anything. If it doesn't say more than your homepage already said, it gives Google no reason to keep it.
• The site is slow. Crawling costs Google money. A site that takes six seconds a page gets crawled less thoroughly than one that takes one, and the pages that lose out are the deeper ones — usually your service and location pages.
• The content builds itself in the browser. Plenty of modern sites send an almost-empty file and assemble the page with JavaScript afterwards. Crawlers can handle this, but they handle it slowly and inconsistently, and pages get skipped. Pre-rendering — building the finished HTML before anyone asks for it — removes the problem entirely.

The things everyone suggests, and where they actually rank

Submitting a sitemap and requesting indexing are worth doing, and they're the advice you'll find everywhere. But they only help with a page Google hasn't found. If the status says "discovered", Google has already found it — resubmitting the same page tells it nothing new. You have to change its assessment, which means changing the page.

Similarly, blocking issues are worth ruling out early because they're catastrophic and quick to check: a stray noindex tag left over from a staging site, or a robots.txt disallowing everything. Rare, but we do find them, usually on sites that were handed over in a hurry.

What to do this week

• Run the site: search and count the pages. Write the number down.
• Connect Google Search Console if it isn't already — it's free and it's the only place this information exists.
• Read the Pages report and note how many are 'discovered — currently not indexed' versus genuinely indexed.
• Open your two thinnest location or service pages side by side. If you could swap the town names and not notice, that's your problem and your fix.
• Check your homepage load time on a phone on mobile data, not on your office wi-fi.

None of that costs anything except an evening. If you'd rather have someone else do it and tell you plainly what they find, that's exactly what our free website audit is — we run the same checks, read the results ourselves, and tell you which of the four causes above is the one actually affecting you.