Start here: is it indexed at all?
Before anything else, find out whether Google knows your site exists. Search for site:yourdomain.co.uk in Google, replacing that with your own address. No quotes, no spaces after the colon.
If you get a list of your pages, you are indexed and the problem is ranking, which is a different thing entirely. Skip to the ranking section below.
If you get nothing at all, Google has not indexed you, and the causes are usually mechanical rather than mysterious.
Being indexed and ranking are two separate problems. Indexed means Google has your page. Ranking means it thinks your page deserves to be seen. Most people who say "I'm not on Google" are actually indexed but sitting on page four.
If you are not indexed at all
1. The site is too new
The dullest answer and very often the right one. A new site or a new page can take days to weeks to be indexed. There is no fee you can pay to speed this up and anyone offering one is selling you something.
What you can do is set up Google Search Console, verify your site, submit your sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your most important pages. That is the only legitimate accelerator.
2. Your robots.txt is blocking crawlers
Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine to stay out. This happens more than you would think, usually left over from when the site was being built.
3. A noindex tag is still in place
Developers add noindex to staging sites so half-finished work does not get indexed, then occasionally forget to remove it at launch. Right click your page, choose View Page Source, and search for the word noindex. If it appears in a robots meta tag, that is your answer.
4. Google cannot find its way around
If pages are only reachable by a form, a dropdown that needs JavaScript, or are not linked from anywhere at all, crawlers may never reach them. Every page worth indexing should be reachable by following ordinary links from your home page.
If you are indexed but nobody finds you
5. You are ranking, just not on page one
Search your exact business name. If you appear, you rank fine for that. The issue is the competitive terms, and that is normal for a newer site rather than a fault to fix.
Ranking for something like "web design Manchester" means outranking firms with years of history and hundreds of links pointing at them. That takes months, not days, and no amount of tinkering with your own pages shortcuts it.
6. Your pages do not say what you do
Open your home page and read the first line. If it says something like "Welcome to our website" or "Quality you can trust", Google has no idea what you sell or where. Say the thing plainly: what you do, and the town you do it in.
The same applies to your page titles. "Home" tells nobody anything. "Emergency Plumber in Oldham | 24 Hour Callout" tells both a person and a search engine exactly what they are looking at.
7. One page is trying to do everything
A single page listing every service you offer will rank properly for none of them. Each service worth being found for deserves its own page with its own title and its own paragraph of detail. Five focused pages beat one page mentioning five things.
8. The site is painfully slow on a phone
Most local searches happen on a phone, often on mobile data. If your site takes six seconds to appear, a good share of visitors leave before they see it, and that behaviour feeds back into rankings. Run your address through Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free, and look at the mobile score rather than the desktop one. Our speed guide covers what to fix and in what order.
Nine times out of ten, slow means enormous images. A photo straight off a phone can be four megabytes. The same picture properly sized for the web is under two hundred kilobytes and looks identical on screen.
Local searches work differently
If you serve a town rather than the whole country, most of your customers never scroll past the map. That block of three businesses with stars next to them is the map pack, and it is fed by your Google Business Profile rather than your website.
So you can be invisible in the map pack while your website is indexed perfectly well. They are separate systems. If local work matters to you, claiming and completing your Business Profile usually moves the needle faster than anything you do on the site itself.
We have written that up separately in the Google Maps guide, including the fields that actually affect where you show up.
How long should this realistically take?
- Indexing a new site: a few days to a few weeks
- Ranking for your own business name: usually within weeks of being indexed
- Long tail and specific phrases: often one to three months
- Competitive local terms: realistically three to six months, sometimes longer
Those are honest ranges, not the ones you want to hear. Anyone promising page one in thirty days either has information nobody else has, or is hoping you will not check.
The checklist, in order
- Search site:yourdomain.co.uk to see whether you are indexed
- Check robots.txt is not blocking everything
- Check your pages for a stray noindex tag
- Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap
- Make sure every page title says what the page is and where you are
- Give each real service its own page
- Run PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile
- Wait. Then check Search Console again in a month.
If you have worked through all nine and something still looks wrong, send us the address and we will take a look and tell you what we see. No charge, and no obligation to use us afterwards.