When someone tells us “we’re not on Google”, our first question is: not on Google for what? Searching your own business name and finding nothing is a very different problem from searching “electrician Ballina” and finding yourself on page four. The first is usually a technical fault you can fix this afternoon. The second is competition, and it takes longer.
Work through these steps in order. Most of the sites we look at turn out to have a step two or step three problem.
Step 1: Does Google have your site at all?
Type site:yourdomain.com.au into Google, with no space after the colon. You’ll see a sample of the pages Google has indexed from your site. It isn’t an exact count, but it answers the basic question.
- No results at all: Google hasn’t indexed you. Go to step 2.
- Some results, but not the page you care about: that page has an indexing problem. Go to step 3.
- Plenty of results, but you don’t appear when you search for your services: you’re indexed and the problem is ranking. Jump to step 5.
Step 2: Brand new, or blocked?
If the site went live in the last week or two, Google may simply not have found it yet. Set up Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, then use URL Inspection on your homepage and click Request indexing. Then give it time. New sites can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to appear, and much longer to rank for anything competitive.
If it’s been live for more than a month and still shows nothing, something is probably blocking Google. Check these four things.
The WordPress “discourage” box. In the WordPress dashboard go to Settings > Reading. If “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked, untick it and save. Developers tick it while building on a staging copy, and occasionally it survives the move to the live site. It’s the most common cause we find on new WordPress sites.
A noindex setting in your SEO plugin. In Yoast SEO, open the Advanced tab in the Yoast box on the page and check “Allow search engines to show this page in search results?”, then check Yoast SEO > Settings > Content types in case a whole post type is hidden from search results. Google’s page on how noindex works is short and worth reading.
robots.txt blocking everything. Visit yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you’re asking every search engine to stay out. A normal small business site should allow almost everything.
A coming-soon or maintenance page. If a maintenance plugin is still switched on, Google sees the holding page and not your site. Log out, or use a private window, and look at the site the way a stranger would.
Step 3: A particular page isn’t indexed
Paste the page’s address into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console. It tells you whether the page is on Google and, if not, gives a reason. The common ones:
URL marked ‘noindex’. Something is telling Google to leave it out. Go back to step 2.
Crawled – currently not indexed. Google looked and chose not to include it. The page is usually thin, very similar to another page, or not linked from anywhere important.
Discovered – currently not indexed. Google knows the page exists but hasn’t crawled it. Link to it from your menu or a related page, then request indexing.
Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google thinks it’s a copy of another page and is showing that one instead. Make the page clearly different, or merge the two.
Our Search Console guide explains these reasons in more detail and which ones are normal.
Step 4: You dropped after a rebuild
If you used to show up and disappeared after a new website went live, the likely cause is missing redirects. The page addresses Google had ranked now return “page not found”, and the new pages are starting from scratch. In Search Console, look for a jump in “Not found (404)” around your launch date.
The fix is a 301 redirect from each old address to its closest new page, which we explain in 301 redirects: keep your Google rankings when you rebuild. A domain change without redirects does the same damage on a bigger scale.
Step 5: You’re indexed but not ranking
This is the most common situation for an established small business, and the least satisfying answer. Other pages are a better match for the search, or more established, or both. Go through each one.
Is there a page for that search? If you want to rank for “switchboard upgrade Lismore” and your site has one Services page with a sentence about switchboards, you’re asking Google to rank a page that isn’t really about it. We explain why one page per service beats one big list.
Is the page better than what’s ranking? Open the top three results next to yours. If they explain the job, show real photos, answer the common questions and make it easy to enquire, and yours is 150 words and a stock photo, you’ve found the gap.
Do the title and heading say what the page is about? “Home” and “Welcome” don’t help anyone, Google included.
Are you searching from the right place? Local results change with the searcher’s location. Search “plumber Ballina” from Brisbane and you’ll see something different from a person in Ballina. Use a private window, and if you need to check from elsewhere, ask someone local to look.
Is it the map or the list? The map results at the top of local searches come from Google Business Profile, not your website. If you’re missing from the map, look at your profile’s category, address, details and reviews before you touch the website. Our guide to setting up Google Business Profile covers this.
How strong is the competition? For a broad search in a bigger town, you’re up against businesses with decade-old websites, hundreds of reviews and links from local media. You can catch up, but it takes months. Narrow searches, a specific service in a specific town, are where small sites win first.
Step 6: The rare but serious causes
Two more to rule out.
A manual action means Google has penalised the site for breaking its spam rules. Check Security & Manual Actions in Search Console. It’s rare for a normal small business, and when we do see one it usually traces back to dodgy link building by a previous SEO provider.
A hacked site often shows up in a site: search as pages you never created, frequently in another language or selling things you don’t sell. Check the Security Issues report too. If you find this, treat it as urgent, because it can also put your visitors at risk. Cleaning up a hacked WordPress site is one of our WordPress fixes, which start from $150 plus GST.
Before you ring anyone
Write down four things: the exact search you expected to appear for, where you searched from, what your site: search showed, and what URL Inspection says about the page. With those, anyone helping you (including us) can quickly tell which of these problems you have, and you won’t pay for an hour of discovery.
If it’s a ranking problem rather than a technical one, our SEO team can tell you what it would realistically take. If the site itself is the problem, a rebuild with the SEO foundations set up properly is sometimes cheaper than patching it.