Why your website isn't on Google

The one-minute check

Type into Google, exactly like this:

``` site:yourbusiness.com ```

With your domain, no space after the colon.

**If pages come up**, Google has it. Your problem is position, not existence. Skip to the second half.

**If nothing comes up**, Google hasn't indexed it. That's the first thing to fix, and it's what follows.

If Google doesn't have it

1. It's new

A freshly published site takes days to a few weeks to appear. You can speed it up: create a free Google Search Console account, verify the domain and request indexing. It's the first thing to do whenever any site goes live.

2. It's accidentally blocked

More common than it sounds, especially if somebody built it and left "discourage search engines" switched on, which many builders enable while a site is under construction.

You check by seeing whether `yourbusiness.com/robots.txt` blocks everything, or whether the pages carry a `noindex` tag. If you don't know how to check, that's exactly what to ask whoever built the site.

3. Nothing links to it

Google finds pages by following links. If yours isn't linked from anywhere, it can take a long time.

The fast free fix: put it on your Google Business Profile, your Instagram and your Facebook. That alone makes it exist for the search engine.

4. It was built somewhere that never really published it

Some builders leave the site in draft mode or on a preview subdomain. Check that the address people see is your domain and not something like `yourbusiness.platform.com/preview`.

If Google has it but it doesn't appear

Then it exists and it's competing, just behind everyone else. The reasons are usually these:

**It doesn't say your trade and your city.** If your site never writes "plumber in Hialeah," it's hard to appear when someone searches that. It isn't about repeating it twenty times: it just has to be written naturally in the headline and the text.

**It loads too slowly.** Slow pages drop, and what almost always weighs is uncompressed photos.

**It doesn't work on a phone.** Google evaluates the mobile version, not the desktop one.

**There's very little text.** A page with a logo, three photos and a phone number gives the search engine almost nothing to work with.

**The competition has years on you.** There you make it up elsewhere, above all on the Google listing, which weighs more for a local business.

What to do, in order

1. **Check with `site:`.**
2. **Search Console**, verify and request indexing. Free.
3. **Write your trade and your cities** in the headline and the text.
4. **Compress the photos.**
5. **Link to it** from your Google listing and your social profiles.

With that handled, the rest is time. And remember that for a local business the Google listing brings more calls than the website: if you have to choose where to spend the afternoon, spend it there.