It's one of the calls we get most often. Someone mentions in passing that they looked the business up on Google and it didn't come up; the owner checks on their own phone, types the name and there it is, right at the top. When your website doesn't appear on Google for people who don't know you, searching for it yourself is the worst way to check: you've been opening that page from that phone for years, and Google knows it.
Not being there and not showing up are different problems
Two different things hide behind the same sentence, and each is fixed differently.
The first is that Google doesn't have your pages stored. That's indexing: the search engine has to visit your site, read it and decide it's worth keeping. If it hasn't got that far, ranking is beside the point, because you don't exist in its index.
The second is that it does have them, but places them on page three. That's ranking, and it's another conversation: you're up against businesses that have been working those searches for years.
There's a ten-second trick to tell which one you're in. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, with the colon and no spaces. If not a single page comes up, you have an indexing problem. If eight or ten appear, they're stored and what's failing is the position.
Do it in an incognito window and, if you can, on mobile data rather than your own wifi. Your history and location show you what you want to see, not what a new customer sees from the next town over.
Cause 1: Google hasn't come by yet
This is what happens to almost every newly published site. Nobody links to that domain, the sitemap hasn't been submitted and the search engine has no reason to hurry. It takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks, and there's no button to fully speed it up, though you can push:
- Set the site up in Google Search Console. It's free and it's the only real window into what Google sees of your site.
- Submit the sitemap, the file listing all your pages. Any decent platform generates it on its own.
- Request indexing for the four or five pages that actually sell, one by one.
- Get two or three real links: your Google business profile, your trade directory, the local traders' association, your social accounts. Those are the roads the search engine travels.
If you want to understand why it sometimes takes so long, Google explains crawling and indexing in its documentation on how Search works. In short: it crawls, it decides what to keep and then it ranks. Those are three separate steps, and failing the first leaves the other two with nothing to work on.
Cause 2: you're telling Google to stay out
This is the infuriating one, because it takes a minute to fix and can sit there for months without anyone noticing. It happens when the site is built on a staging domain, blocked so the half-finished version doesn't get indexed, and then published exactly as it is, block included.
The three usual suspects:
- The WordPress checkbox "Discourage search engines from indexing this site", under Settings, Reading.
- A noindex tag inherited from the staging environment and still sitting in the code of some pages.
- The robots.txt file with a rule that shuts everything out. You can see it by visiting yourdomain.com/robots.txt: if it says Disallow followed by a slash and nothing else, there's your answer.
In Search Console this shows up by name in the page indexing report: "Excluded by noindex tag" or "Blocked by robots.txt". Google keeps a guide to robots.txt that clears up what the file does and, more usefully, what it doesn't.
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Cause 3: you show up, but for things nobody searches for
Here the site is indexed perfectly well. The problem is that it's written inwards. The tabs are called "Home", "Company" and "Services", and the copy opens with "we are a family business founded in 1987".
Nobody searches for that. People type the problem they have: blind repair in Girona, employment lawyer in Sabadell, wedding catering in the Empordà. If those words aren't in your titles and headings, Google has no way to connect you to the search, however good you are.
The fix is boring and it works: one page per service, using the name your customer uses rather than the one you use in the office. The tab title, which is what people read in the results, carrying that same name and the area. And inside, the answer to what they actually ask: what's included, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, what happens if something goes wrong.
Cause 4: it takes so long they close it first
A good share of these searches happen on a phone, often on patchy coverage, out in the street, in a hurry. A site with four-megabyte photos, a template loaded with plugins and a menu that jumps around while it loads gets closed before it finishes appearing.
Google measures the real experience of the people who land on your pages, so slowness doesn't only scare customers off: it also counts against you when results are ordered. One check beats any report: pick up your phone, come off the wifi and open your own site as if you were a customer. Whatever annoys you will annoy a stranger twice as much.
Cause 5: there isn't enough site to rank
A single page with two hundred words competes badly, simply because it says almost nothing. A site like that can only aim at searches for your own name, which you had already won.
The answer isn't writing for the sake of it. It's covering what people ask before they buy: every service with its own page, common doubts answered one at a time, prices if you dare to publish them. That's what the web articles we write are for: not decoration, but taking over the questions your competitors currently answer.
It's included in our plans and it's published: the €200 a month plan comes with one article per month, the €400 one goes up to three on the site and three on your Google profile, and it grows from there. It's the slow part of the job and also the part still bringing visits two years later.
The awkward case: you search your own name and someone else comes up
Sometimes the site isn't the problem, everything around it is. You type the business name and a competitor sits at the top, or an old listing with the address from three moves ago.
It usually comes from a Google business profile that's unverified, duplicated or abandoned, plus details that don't match between the website, the profile and the directories you're listed in. When the name, address and phone number shift depending on where you look, the search engine trusts all of them less. Finishing the profile, lining those details up everywhere, uploading recent photos and replying to reviews fixes more than you'd expect, and it shows in weeks rather than months.
How long it takes to see a change
It helps to separate the timelines, because they aren't the same problem:
- Indexing: from a day to a couple of weeks after the block is removed or the sitemap is submitted.
- Ranking: first movements in two to three months; solid results in six to twelve.
- Local searches: usually the quickest, because fewer competitors work them seriously.
And a warning we always give: if somebody promises you the top spot in three weeks, they're either buying you poor-quality links or they'll show you a ranking for a search nobody makes.
If you only have one afternoon, check these in order
- site:yourdomain.com on Google, in incognito, to find out whether it's an index or a ranking problem.
- Search Console set up, sitemap submitted and the page indexing report open.
- Blocks: the WordPress checkbox, noindex tags and robots.txt.
- Titles on the five pages that sell, with the words your customer uses and the area.
- Your site on a phone, off the wifi, stopwatch in hand.
- Google business profile finished, details matching and reviews answered.
That order isn't accidental. The first three can be stopping anything else from being seen, and sorting them usually costs one afternoon.
How we go about it
We always start with what's blocking, not with what looks good. First we check that Google can get in and store your pages, then that those pages point at the searches you care about, and only after that do we work on new content. It's less impressive than redesigning the whole site, but it's what changes the outcome.
Our prices are published and there's no lock-in: you can see them on our pricing page. SEO sits inside the monthly plans, alongside GEO so you also turn up in AI answers, which increasingly resolve these searches before anyone clicks a link at all.
If you'd rather start by knowing what's actually happening, write to us and we'll look. The diagnosis often takes a short while, and you don't have to hire anyone to walk away with it.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.