Why your website is not showing on Google

"My website isn't showing on Google" is the most common thing people email me about, and it almost always turns out to be one of about six things. The trouble is that they're wildly different problems with wildly different fixes, and most people start guessing at the hardest one first.

So here's the order I actually work through it. Do these in sequence. Stop when you find your answer, because the later steps only make sense once the earlier ones come back clean.

1. Search for your own domain, properly

Not your business name. Type this into Google, with your own domain:

site:yourbusiness.ie

This asks Google to list only pages it holds from that domain. What you see next splits the problem cleanly in two.

Nothing at all? Google does not have your site. This is an indexing problem, and everything in steps 2 to 4 applies. It is also the good news case, because indexing problems are usually a single setting and the fix can show up within days.

Your pages are listed? Then Google has your site and this is a ranking problem. Skip to step 5. Nothing you do to your sitemap will help.

One caveat: site: is a rough tool and it under-reports on big sites. For a small business site it's accurate enough to tell these two cases apart, which is all we need it for.

2. Check you are not telling Google to stay away

If site: came back empty, the most likely cause is that your own site is asking not to be indexed. There are three places this hides, and I find at least one of them in a fair share of the sites I look at.

• The WordPress tick box. Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". This gets ticked during a build and then nobody unticks it at launch. It is the single most common cause of a completely invisible website, and it is two clicks to fix.
• A noindex tag. Open your homepage, view source, and search for noindex. SEO plugins can set this per page, and a bulk edit can apply it far more widely than intended.
• robots.txt. Visit yourbusiness.ie/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: /, that's a staging-site rule that went live with the site. Note that robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing, so it's a slightly different failure — but the practical result is the same.

Fix any of these and Google will usually start picking pages up within a few days. There's nothing to wait months for; it simply couldn't see them before.

3. Check the site is actually reachable

Less common, but worth ruling out because it costs thirty seconds:

• Does the site load for a stranger? Not on your phone with your Wi-Fi and your browser cache. Ask someone on mobile data.
• Is there a "coming soon" or maintenance plugin still active? These serve a holding page to everyone except logged-in users. You see the site. Google sees a holding page.
• Is the SSL certificate valid? An expired certificate produces a browser warning, and Google treats that badly.
• Is it password protected? Some hosts put HTTP authentication on staging subdomains and it occasionally survives a move to the live domain.

4. If the site is new, it may just be new

A brand new domain with no links pointing to it can take days to a few weeks to appear. That's normal, and it's also the one case where the honest answer is "wait".

You can speed it up. Set up Google Search Console, verify the domain, submit your sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing of your homepage and your two or three most important pages. That's not a trick; it's the front door, and it's free.

While you're in there, Search Console will tell you directly what it thinks. The Pages report lists every URL it declined to index and why: "Excluded by 'noindex' tag", "Blocked by robots.txt", "Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical", "Discovered – currently not indexed". Those messages are the actual diagnosis. Most people never look, and the answer has been sitting there for months.

5. If you are indexed but not ranking, it is a different conversation

This is where most people actually are, and it's why "my site isn't on Google" is such a misleading way to describe the problem. Your site is on Google. It's on page four.

The usual reasons, in rough order of how often I see them:

• Your pages don't say what you do or where you do it. "Welcome to our website" is not something anybody searches for. If you're a plumber in Swords, the words "plumber" and "Swords" need to appear in your title tag, your heading and your text, because you are otherwise asking Google to guess.
• Every page has the same title. Fifteen pages titled "Home | My Business" give Google nothing to distinguish them.
• There's almost nothing on the page. A service page with forty words and a stock photo has nothing to rank. This isn't about word count for its own sake; it's that you have not actually answered anything.
• Nobody links to you. Links are still how Google judges whether anyone takes you seriously. A new site with none is starting from zero against competitors with fifteen years of them.
• You are competing with national sites for a national term. Ranking for "insurance" is not a realistic target. Ranking for "classic car insurance Galway" might be. Be specific enough to win.
• It's too slow on a phone. Page experience is a real ranking signal and, more importantly, people leave. That's a separate job, and a measurable one.

6. For a local business, the website may not be the problem at all

This is the part that catches people out, and it's the reason I stopped treating "website SEO" as a self-contained job.

When somebody in Dublin searches "barber near me", the results they see first are the map pack: three local listings with stars and directions. Those come from Google Business Profile, not from your website. You can have a perfect site and be completely absent from the results that actually generate walk-ins and phone calls.

So check: do you have a verified Google Business Profile? Is it in the right primary category? Do the name, address and phone number on it match your website exactly? Do you have any reviews? For a lot of Irish small businesses, fixing the profile moves the needle faster than anything you could do to the website, and it costs nothing.

If your profile has been taken down rather than never set up, that's its own particular nightmare — I've written about what actually works when a Google Business Profile is suspended.

What I'd do first, if it were my business

1. Run site:yourdomain.ie. Two minutes, and it tells you which half of this article applies to you.
2. Set up Search Console and read the Pages report. Free, and it usually contains the answer in plain language.
3. Check the WordPress "discourage search engines" box. Two clicks, and it's the most common single cause of total invisibility.
4. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. For a local business this is the highest-return hour you will spend.

That's genuinely most of it, and all of it is free. Where it gets harder is when those come back clean and you still aren't found — because then the cause is usually several small things interacting rather than one obvious switch, and that's what a technical SEO audit is for. There's also a free 5-point check if you'd rather have someone else run the first pass and tell you whether it's worth going further.

Ciprian Popescu runs WP Dublin and builds WordPress plugins at getButterfly. He has been helping Irish businesses get found online since 2002. More about me.