Why Your Website is Not Showing on Google (And What to Do About It)
The most common complaint I hear from small business owners: "I have a website but it does not seem to come up on Google."
Sometimes this is an SEO problem. Sometimes it is simpler than that. Here is a checklist of the actual reasons it happens, in order of how likely they are.
1. Google has not indexed your site yet
If your site is new or was recently rebuilt, Google may not have crawled it yet. New domains typically take 4 to 12 weeks before they appear for anything other than your exact business name.
What to do: Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console. Go to search.google.com/search-console, add your property, and submit your sitemap URL (usually yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
2. The page titles are wrong
Every page on your website has a title. It is the blue text you see in Google search results. Most bad websites either have no title, or every page has the same one — usually the business name.
Google uses page titles to understand what each page is about. If your homepage title is just "Home" or "Welcome", Google does not know what to rank you for.
What to do: Each page needs a unique title that describes what the page is about and includes the term people would search for. Your homepage might be "Plumber in Kettering | Emergency Callouts | [Business Name]". Your services page might be "Bathroom Fitting Kettering | Full Installation".
3. You are targeting keywords nobody searches for
People often optimise their sites for what they call their service, not what customers actually type. A beautician might talk about "semi-permanent makeup treatments" on their website when customers type "eyebrow tattoo near me".
What to do: Think about the exact words a customer would type when looking for what you do. Not your industry terminology — their words. Then make sure those words appear naturally in your headings and page content.
4. Your site loads too slowly
Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. A site that takes 6 seconds to load on mobile will rank below a faster site on the same search term. This is especially true for local searches, where most people are searching from their phones.
Common causes: unoptimised images, slow hosting, too many third-party scripts, WordPress with a heavy theme.
What to do: Test your site at pagespeed.web.dev. If your mobile score is below 50, your load speed is actively hurting your rankings.
5. Nobody links to your site
Google partly measures how trustworthy and authoritative a site is by how many other sites link to it. A brand new site with no links is starting from zero authority.
This does not mean you need hundreds of backlinks. For local businesses, a few relevant ones matter more: your Google Business Profile, your local chamber of commerce directory, any trade associations, and mentions in local press.
What to do: Claim and complete your Google Business Profile first. This alone is one of the most effective things a local business can do for search visibility.
6. You are on a platform that limits what Google can do with your site
Wix, Squarespace and similar builders have improved their SEO capabilities. But they are still not as clean for Google to crawl as a properly built custom site. If you are on a slow, template-based platform, that affects your ceiling.
What we do differently
Every site we build at NexaDesign includes:
- Proper page titles and meta descriptions for every page
- Schema markup so Google understands what your business is, where it is, and what it offers
- A dynamically generated sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
- Fast load times built into the code from the start
- Mobile-first design
We are based in Kettering and work with businesses across the UK. If your current site is not performing in search, we can usually tell you why within minutes.
