You publish the site, search for your business on Google and nothing comes up. It's the call I get most often, and the explanation is nearly always one of these four.
It's too new
Google takes time to find and rank a freshly published site. It can be days or a few weeks. If yours is three days old, nothing is broken: it just needs time. You can speed it up by registering it in Google Search Console, which is free and also tells you what Google is seeing.
You're searching for impossible terms
If you run a hairdresser's and search for «hairdresser», you're up against thousands of sites and against the ones that have been there for fifteen years. Try your business name, or «hairdresser» followed by your neighbourhood. You should show up there — and those are the searches that bring real clients: people searching broadly are browsing, people searching specifically are deciding.
Nobody links to you and nobody mentions you
Google trusts sites that others link to. If nobody has ever linked to yours, it struggles to believe you exist. Nothing exotic is needed: your Google Business listing, your social profiles, your trade association's directory or the website of a supplier you work with.
You told Google not to come in
It sounds absurd, but it happens more than you'd think. While a site is being built, search engines are usually told not to index it, and sometimes nobody removes that on launch day. If your site has been live for months and doesn't appear even when you search its exact name, this is the first thing to check.
What you can do this week
- 01Search your exact business name and see whether it comes up.
- 02Register with Google Search Console and submit your site.
- 03Create or claim your Google Business listing if customers visit you.
- 04Ask whoever built the site to confirm it isn't blocked.