Why your website is not showing up on Google.

There are only three reasons, and they need completely different fixes. Spending a month on the wrong one is the usual outcome. Here is how to tell which you have, in about a minute, and what to do about each.

Written by Ronnie Foster, who runs Fernvie. Last updated August 10, 2026. We have built and looked after work for Smith+Nephew, Hallmark Channel, Habitat for Humanity and the Downtown Memphis Commission, and for a lot of small shops and one truck outfits whose names you would not know.

First, the sixty second test

Go to Google and search for this, with your own address and no space after the colon:

site:yourbusiness.com

That asks Google to list only pages it holds from your site. What comes back tells you which of the three problems you have.

In a hurry? Our free check reads your front page the way Google does and takes about eight seconds. Come back here afterwards and the three reasons below will make more sense.

• Several pages listedYou are in Google. This is a ranking problem, not an indexing one. Skip to reason three.
• Only one or two pages, and you have moreGoogle knows your site but has not taken most of it. Reason two.
• Nothing at allGoogle does not have your site. Reason one.

Reason one: Google does not know your pages exist

Google finds pages by following links and by reading sitemaps. If nothing links to a page and no sitemap mentions it, that page is invisible no matter how good it is.

Check the switch that hides your whole site first. Every platform has one, it is on by default while a site is being built, and forgetting to turn it off is the single most common cause of this entire problem. It is worth two minutes before anything else.

• WordPressSettings, then Reading. Make sure "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked. This one catches almost everybody.
• WixMarketing & SEO, then SEO Settings. "Let search engines index your site" must be on. Each page also has its own toggle under its SEO settings.
• SquarespaceSettings, then Site Availability. A site set to Private or Password Protected cannot be indexed. Individual pages have a "Hide from search engines" option too.
• ShopifyOnline Store, then Preferences. If password protection is still on, nothing is visible to Google.

If the switch is fine, the next causes are ordinary and fixable:

• No sitemap submittedSet up Google Search Console, free, and submit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. It is how you tell Google every page you have in one go.
• Pages nothing links toA page reachable only from a sitemap tends to stay unknown. If your own site never links to a page, Google reads that as a statement about how much it matters.
• The site is genuinely newA domain registered last month with nothing pointing at it waits its turn. Weeks, not hours.

Reason two: Google knows, and chose not to index

In Search Console this reads "Crawled, currently not indexed". It means Google came, read the page, and decided not to give it a slot. That is not a penalty and it is not a punishment. It is a judgement about whether the page is worth storing.

It usually comes down to one of these:

• Nothing vouches for youThe biggest one by far. If no other website links to yours, Google has no reason to believe anyone would miss you.
• The page says very littleA page of three sentences and a stock photo is a page Google already has ten thousand of.
• It repeats another pageSix service pages that differ only in the town name get treated as one page, and five get dropped.
• The same page answers on several addresseswww and non-www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash. Pick one and redirect the rest to it.

The fix for the first of those is not technical. A Google Business Profile, a listing in a directory people actually use, a chamber of commerce page, a supplier who links to you. Real mentions from real places. It is slower than a settings change and it is the one that matters most.

Reason three: you are indexed, but nobody scrolls that far

If that first test listed your pages, you are in Google already. Being on page four is indistinguishable from being invisible, but it is a different problem with different fixes.

• Your page titles do not match what people typeA page called "Our Services" matches nothing. A page called "Emergency Plumber, Memphis" matches what somebody actually typed at eleven at night.
• You have no Google Business ProfileFor anything local this outweighs everything on your website. It is free, and it is what puts you on the map.
• No reviewsGoogle leans on them heavily for local results, and so do the people reading them.
• The page is slow, or awkward on a phoneMost searches happen on a phone. A site that is hard to use on one gets ranked as if it is.
• Somebody else answered the question betterWhoever ranks above you wrote a page that answers what was asked. That is usually the whole story.

What we would honestly tell you

Nobody can promise you page one, and anybody who does is either guessing or lying. Google does not sell places in its results and nobody has a private line to it.

What is true is that most small business sites we look at have a specific, findable reason they are not showing up, and it is usually not mysterious. It is a switch left on, a missing sitemap, a page called the wrong thing, or a business Google has no reason to trust yet.

It is also worth being blunt about the cost of leaving it. Every week a site sits invisible is a week of people searching for exactly what you sell and finding somebody else. That is not lost ranking, it is lost work, and unlike ranking it does not come back.

If you would rather we just fixed it

Our 48 hour fix list, $495, covers exactly this kind of work on the site you already have. We tell you the five things we would change before we touch anything. If the problem is bigger than five things, we say so rather than take the money, and a rebuild starts at $995.

If you want the whole picture first, the full audit is $199 and covers every page rather than just the front one.

Common questions