Why isn't my website showing up on Google?

You built a website, you can see it when you type the address in, but when you search your own business name on Google — nothing. Or worse, you search the thing you actually do ("plumber near me", "dog groomer in your town") and you're nowhere to be found. It's one of the most common and most frustrating problems small business owners run into.

The good news: there's almost always a specific, fixable reason. "Showing up on Google" is really two separate questions. First, does Google even know your site exists (indexing)? Second, when it does, does Google think you're the best answer for what someone searched (ranking)? A lot of confusion comes from mixing these up.

This guide walks through every common cause — from brand-new sites to thin content to technical blocks — in plain English, and shows you how to check each one yourself. No jargon, no upsell.

Before anything else, find out whether Google has your pages in its index at all. This takes ten seconds. Go to Google and search:

site:yourdomain.com (replace with your real address)

If Google shows a list of your pages, you're indexed — your problem is ranking, not indexing, so skip ahead to the sections on keywords and content. If Google shows zero results, that's your answer: Google can't or won't include your site, and no amount of tweaking keywords will help until that's sorted.

• Pages appear — you're indexed. The issue is where you rank, not whether you're found.
• Nothing appears — Google isn't indexing you. Work through the "too new" and "technical issues" sections below.
• Only some pages appear — partial indexing, often caused by thin content or blocked pages on the ones that are missing.

If you launched in the last few days or weeks, patience is genuinely part of the answer. Google has to discover your site, crawl it, and decide it's worth indexing. For a brand-new domain with no links pointing to it, that can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks.

You don't have to sit and wait, though. You can actively tell Google you exist. Set up a free Google Search Console account, verify your site, and submit your sitemap (usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). This is the single most useful thing you can do — it's Google's official channel for site owners and it shows you exactly what Google sees.

Once you're in Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool to check your homepage and request indexing. It nudges Google to come and look sooner.

This is the big one for sites that are indexed but never show up for anything useful. Google can only rank you for words that actually appear on your pages, written the way real people search.

A lot of small business homepages say something like "Welcome to our website — we're passionate about quality and service." That's lovely, but nobody types "passionate about quality" into Google. They type "emergency electrician in your town" or "gluten-free bakery near me". If those phrases — your service plus your location — don't appear clearly in your page titles, headings and copy, Google has nothing to match you against.

• Put your main service + location in your homepage title tag and main heading (H1).
• Give each distinct service its own page with its own targeted heading, rather than cramming everything onto one.
• Write the way customers speak, not the way your industry does internally.
• Include suburb, town and region names naturally if you serve a local area — locals search that way.

Google wants to send searchers to pages that genuinely answer their question. A page with two sentences and a phone number doesn't give Google much to work with, and it often won't rank — or won't even get indexed.

"Thin content" means pages with very little unique, useful text. It's common on template sites where every service page is a near-copy of the others with one word swapped, or where a homepage is mostly a big image and a slogan. Aim to actually explain what you do, who it's for, what's included, and why someone should choose you. A few hundred words of genuinely helpful copy beats a beautiful page that says nothing.

If you're a local business, your website isn't the only thing that shows up on Google — and often it isn't even the most important. The map results and the box that appears on the right when you search a business name come from a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), which is separate from your website.

It's free, it's the main way local businesses appear in "near me" searches and Google Maps, and a huge number of small operators either haven't claimed theirs or have left it half-finished. If you serve customers in a specific area, setting this up properly is often the fastest win of anything on this list.

• Claim and verify your profile at google.com/business.
• Fill in every field: categories, hours, service area, phone, and your website link.
• Add real photos and keep your details identical to what's on your website.
• Ask happy customers for reviews — they strongly influence local visibility.

Sometimes the site is fine and the content is good, but a technical setting is quietly telling Google to stay away. These are easy to miss because the site looks perfectly normal to you as a visitor.

The most common culprits are a leftover "discourage search engines" setting (WordPress has a tick-box for this that's meant for sites still in development), a noindex tag left on pages, or a robots.txt file blocking crawlers. Others include a site that only works with or without "www", broken redirects, or a security certificate problem that makes browsers and Google distrust the site.

• In WordPress: Settings → Reading → make sure "Discourage search engines" is unticked.
• Check your pages don't carry a noindex meta tag (a developer or your site builder can confirm).
• Make sure your site loads over https with a valid certificate — no "Not secure" warning.
• Confirm yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com both resolve to the same working site.

If you're indexed, targeting sensible keywords, and technically clean, but still sitting on page three, the honest answer may be that established competitors have more content, more links, and more history for that search. Ranking for a competitive term like "accountant" in a big city is a marathon, not a switch you flip.

The practical move is to go after searches you can realistically win: more specific services, your actual suburb rather than the whole city, and the questions your customers ask. "Bookkeeper for cafes in your town" is far easier to rank for than "accountant" in a capital city — and the person searching it is a much better lead anyway.

Working through every item above by hand takes time and some technical know-how. This is exactly what an automated audit is built for. A free AISiteFix scan checks your site's indexability, page titles and headings, content depth, mobile setup, https and speed in one pass, and tells you in plain English what's holding you back — no login required.

For a deeper breakdown with prioritised fixes and specific wording suggestions, the Premium Report goes page by page. You can also see a sample report first to know exactly what you'd get.