Why your business isn't showing up on Google

"We don't show up on Google" describes at least four completely different problems with four completely different fixes. Buying SEO before you know which one you have is how people spend money for six months and see nothing.

Here's how to diagnose it, in the order that costs least.

First: are you missing, or just losing?

Search your exact business name. Then search a service plus your city.

• Nothing at all for your business name → you likely have an indexing or profile problem. Start at cause 1.
• You appear for your name but not for services → you're indexed and being outranked. Skip to cause 5.
• You appear in normal results but not the map → that's a local problem. See our Map Pack guide.

1. Google hasn't indexed your site

If your pages aren't in the index they cannot rank, no matter how good they are. Check Search Console's indexing report. New sites can simply take time; older sites that vanished usually have a technical cause.

2. You're accidentally blocking crawlers

This is the single most common catastrophic SEO bug, and it's almost always an accident. A staging site gets a noindex tag or a robots.txt disallow to keep it private, then goes live with the block still in place.

Check your robots.txt and look for noindex meta tags on pages that should rank. If you redesigned recently and traffic fell off a cliff, check this first.

3. A migration broke your URLs

If you changed platforms or restructured the site without 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent, you threw away the ranking history of every page. Google sees the old URLs 404 and the new ones as brand new.

4. Your business information is inconsistent

If your name, address, and phone number differ across your site, your Google Business Profile, and directories, you're asking Google to work out whether these are the same business. Ambiguity costs confidence, and confidence is what ranking is made of. This one is common enough that it gets its own guide.

5. You have no page targeting what people search

Very common and very fixable. Businesses list services as bullet points on a homepage and expect to rank for each one. Google ranks pages, not businesses. If you want to rank for a service, that service needs a real page with substantive content.

6. Your content is thinner than the competition's

Look at who currently ranks for your target term and read their page properly. If theirs answers twelve questions a customer has and yours has two paragraphs and a stock photo, the ranking gap is not mysterious.

The fix is not more words. It's answering more of the real questions, more directly, than the page currently above you.

7. Your site is slow or awkward on mobile

Page experience is a tiebreaker rather than a trump card, but local search is full of near-identical competitors where tiebreakers decide. It also affects whether traffic converts once it arrives. See Core Web Vitals.

8. Nobody links to you

Links remain a significant signal. You don't need thousands. For a local business a handful of genuine local links moves the needle: the chamber of commerce, suppliers, sponsorships, local press, industry associations you belong to.

Do not buy links. It works until it doesn't, and the recovery is far more expensive than the shortcut saved.

9. You're competing above your weight

Sometimes the honest answer is that the term is dominated by national brands with enormous authority. The fix is to go more specific: the service plus the neighbourhood, the specialism, the exact problem. Lower volume, far higher intent, and actually winnable.

The order to work through it

1. 01Set up Google Search Console if you haven't. Without it you're guessing.
2. 02Confirm your pages are indexed and nothing is blocking crawlers.
3. 03Verify redirects if you've ever migrated or redesigned.
4. 04Make your business details identical everywhere.
5. 05Build a real page for each service you want to rank for.
6. 06Improve the depth of those pages against whoever currently outranks you.
7. 07Fix speed and mobile.
8. 08Earn a few genuine local links.

That order matters: the early items are cheap and occasionally fix everything on their own. We'll run through it on your site for free and tell you which of these is your problem. Send us your website — or if you're evaluating vendors instead, see what to ask before hiring a local SEO firm.