Why is my website not showing up on Google?
You built a website. You picked the template, wrote the words, loaded the photos and pressed publish. Then you searched for your own business and found nothing. Maybe your Facebook page came up, or a directory listing you never asked for. Not your site.
This is one of the most common things UK small business owners come to us with, and it is almost never because Google has something against you. It is usually because the site has never given Google the basic information it needs, and Wix, Squarespace and WordPress will all let you publish without any of it. Here is what normally goes wrong, and what each one costs you. Pick three and check your own site today.
Start here: does Google even know your site exists?
In Google, type site:yourdomain.co.uk, using your own address, no space after the colon. Back comes every page Google is holding for you. Nothing at all means your site has not been indexed. Your home page and nothing else means Google found the front door and none of the rooms.
Your page titles are missing, duplicated, or say nothing
The page title is the blue clickable line in a Google result, and the text in your browser tab. It is the strongest signal about what a page is for. On a lot of self-built sites every page carries the same one: the business name, or a placeholder from the template. Five pages tell Google the same thing, and none says what you sell or where you are.
What it costs you: someone in your town searches for what you do and you are not in the running, because no page on your site ever claimed that subject. A competitor with a page titled "Sports Massage in Stirling" is a straight answer to the question.
Check it: read the browser tab on every page. Good titles name the service and the place, and read like something a person would type.
No meta description, so Google writes your advert for you
The meta description is the grey summary under the title in the results. It does not push you up the rankings directly, but it decides whether anyone clicks once you are there. Leave it blank and Google pulls whatever text it can scrape off the page: your cookie notice, your navigation menu, half a sentence cut off in the middle.
What it costs you: you rank perfectly well and still lose the click to the listing below you, because theirs reads like an offer and yours reads like a fragment.
No H1 and no heading structure, so the page has no shape
Headings are not decoration. They are how a page explains itself. The H1 is the main heading and there should be exactly one. H2s are the sections underneath it.
With drag-and-drop builders you style text by eye. You make something big and bold because it looks right, and the builder wraps it in whatever it fancies. The largest text on the page often is not a heading at all, and the only real H1 is the word "Home" left over from the template.
What it costs you: Google has to guess what the page is about from a wall of flat text. It usually guesses badly, or decides the page is not a strong answer to anything and leaves it out. Screen readers rely on the same structure, so you are shutting out visitors who use one.
Check it: on a computer, right click a page, choose "View page source" and search the code for <h1. None, or four, and you have found something worth fixing.
No sitemap, so Google has to find everything the hard way
A sitemap is a file listing every page you want Google to know about. It guarantees nothing, but it means Google is not relying on luck to find your pages. It matters most for pages that are not in your main menu: service pages, location pages, older posts. Those are often the ones most likely to bring in a booking.
Check it: type your address followed by /sitemap.xml. You should see a list of your pages. A "page not found" is one of your problems.
Pages that exist but have never been indexed
Being on the internet and being in Google's index are two different things. A page can be live, look perfect, and simply not be in the database Google searches. Usually it is one of three reasons. Nothing links to the page, so nothing led Google to it. The page is too thin to be worth storing: a heading, two lines and a contact button. Or the site is telling search engines not to index it, which happens whenever a builder's "hide from search engines" setting gets switched on during the build and never switched off again.
Check it: set up Google Search Console. It is free, and it tells you page by page what Google has indexed, what it skipped and why. If you do one thing off the back of this article, do this one.
Two of your pages are competing with each other
Say you are a personal trainer in Leeds. Over time you have added a "Personal Training" page, a "1-1 Coaching" page and a blog post called "Why work with a personal trainer in Leeds". All three chase the same search. You have not tripled your chances, you have split them. Google picks which of three near-identical pages is the answer, and it often picks your weakest, or decides none is convincing and shows somebody else.
Check it: list your pages and write next to each the search you want it to win. Where two have the same answer, merge them and redirect the old address to the survivor. Fewer, stronger pages win.
Your Google Business Profile is missing, or does not match your site
For a salon, clinic, gym or anything people search for locally, the Google Business Profile does much of the heavy lifting. It is what puts you in the map results. Two things go wrong. Either it was never claimed, so you are invisible in the results your customers use most. Or it exists and disagrees with your website: an old address, a dead number, the name written differently in each place, hours that changed last winter.
What it costs you: Google is working out whether the business in the profile and the business on the site are the same one. Every mismatch makes it less certain, and less certain means less visible. It also means customers ring a number nobody answers.
Check it: open your profile and your contact page side by side. Name, address, phone and hours should match character for character, down to whether you write "Street" or "St".
What to do with all this
Most invisible websites are not badly designed. They look fine. The work that was never done is the work you cannot see: titles, descriptions, headings, a sitemap, pages that each have one clear job, and a business profile that agrees with the site. Plenty of it you can fix yourself in an afternoon. Run the site: search, check your headings, check your sitemap, claim your profile.
It gets harder when the platform itself is the limit: when you cannot control what the builder does to your code, or you are stacking plugins to patch problems a properly built page would never have had. We hand-build sites in clean HTML, no page builders and no plugins, with the search work part of the build rather than sold back to you later. If you have worked through this list and your site still is not showing up, that is usually why.
If you want to see it rather than read about it: send us your website — or just your Instagram — and we'll rebuild your main page properly and send it over as a link. Free, no call, nothing to book. You get the new page and a short note on what we changed and why, so you can judge the thinking as well as the result. Get my free website here.
If you'd rather talk it through than read it, there's a free 15-minute call too.