Why isn't my website showing up on Google?

Step 1: Is your site indexed at all?

Go to Google and search for site:yourdomain.co.uk — your actual domain, no spaces after the colon.

If pages come back: you're indexed. Skip to step 4 — you have a ranking problem, not an indexing one.

If nothing comes back: Google either doesn't know your site exists or has been told to ignore it. Keep reading.

Step 2: Are you accidentally blocking Google?

This is the single most common cause of a site being invisible, and it's almost always accidental — a setting left over from when the site was being built.

• The "discourage search engines" tick box. WordPress has one under Settings → Reading. It gets ticked during development and forgotten. Untick it.
• A noindex tag. View your page source and search for "noindex". If it's there, that's your answer — it explicitly tells Google to stay away.
• robots.txt blocking everything. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: /, the whole site is blocked.
• The site is behind a password or on a staging URL. More common than you'd think when a launch was rushed.

Fix any of these and Google will usually pick the site up within a couple of weeks, or days if you request indexing in Search Console.

Step 3: Have you set up Google Search Console?

It's free, it takes about twenty minutes, and it's the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Add and verify your domain, submit your sitemap (usually yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml), then look at the Pages report. It will state, page by page, whether something is indexed and if not, why.

If you do nothing else from this guide, do this. Working without it is guessing.

Step 4: Is your Google Business Profile sorted?

For a local trade this outranks almost everything else. When someone searches "roofer near me" on a phone, the map pack fills the screen — and your website has nothing to do with who appears there. Your Business Profile does.

Check three things: is it claimed and verified, is the primary category the specific one for your trade rather than something generic, and are your service areas set to the towns you actually cover? Those three fix more visibility problems than any amount of website work.

Step 5: Do you have pages for what people search?

A very common shape: a five-page site with a single "Services" page listing eight services, and no mention of any town. It has nothing for Google to match against "boiler repair Warrington", so it doesn't rank for it.

• One page per service you actually want more of.
• One page per town you'd genuinely travel to — with real content on each.
• Page titles that name the service and the place, not "Home" and "Services".

Step 6: Is the site technically capable of ranking?

Speed and mobile usability are ranking factors and, more importantly, they decide whether anyone stays. Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights. If mobile scores under about 50, that's worth fixing — and if the site is a heavy page-builder build, fixing it properly usually means a redesign rather than tinkering.

Step 7: Give it time, then reassess

SEO moves in months. Make the fixes above, then leave it eight to twelve weeks before judging. Chopping and changing weekly is how people convince themselves nothing works.

One last thing worth checking: if you are getting visitors and still no phone calls, visibility was never the problem. Read traffic but no enquiries instead — more traffic to a site that doesn't convert just means more people leaving.

For the full, ordered process rather than a fault-finding checklist, see the local SEO guide, or our local SEO service if you'd rather it was done for you.