Why isn’t my website showing up on Google?

This is the most common question people ask a few weeks after launching, and the most common answers given to it are wrong. Before you buy an SEO package or blame your developer, spend ten minutes working out which of two completely different problems you have.

First: indexing or ranking?

An indexing problem means Google does not have your pages at all. A ranking problem means it has them and is putting other pages first. They look identical from where you are sitting and they have nothing in common as fixes, so establishing which one you have is the whole first step.

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com — your domain, with that prefix and no space. If you see your pages listed, Google has them and you have a ranking problem — skip ahead. If you see nothing, you have an indexing problem, and no amount of content will help until it is fixed.

If Google does not have your site

It might simply be too new

A site published last week is often not indexed yet, and that is normal rather than broken. Google has to discover it, crawl it and decide it is worth keeping. Give a new site a few weeks before treating this as a fault.

Something might be telling Google to stay away

Two small files can make an entire site invisible, and both are easy to leave in the wrong state after a build:

• A noindex instruction. Staging sites carry this deliberately, and it survives the move to production more often than anyone admits. It is one line and it hides everything.
• robots.txt blocking crawlers. Same story: correct while you were building, forgotten afterwards.
• A password or holding page still in front of the real site.

Your content might only exist after JavaScript runs

If your pages are assembled in the browser rather than delivered as HTML, search engines see an empty shell on the first pass. Google will usually come back and run the JavaScript later, but it is slower and not guaranteed — and other crawlers, including the ones behind AI answers, generally do not run JavaScript at all.

You can check this yourself: view the page source (not the inspector — the actual source) and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is not in there, that is what crawlers get.

Nothing links to you and you never told anyone

Google finds sites by following links and by reading sitemaps. A brand-new domain with no inbound links and no sitemap submitted can sit unnoticed for a long time. Submitting your sitemap in Search Console is free and takes two minutes.

If Google has your site but you cannot find it

You are searching for something you never wrote about

This is the most common cause by far. People search for “emergency plumber Beşiktaş” and their site says “quality solutions for all your plumbing needs”. Those two things share no words. Write the way your customers speak, including the place name, and say plainly what you do.

You are competing for a term you cannot win yet

A new site will not rank for “web design” or “lawyer”. It can rank for “commercial lease dispute lawyer in Izmir” quite quickly, because far fewer pages are competing and the ones searching are closer to hiring anyway. Narrow beats broad when you are new — not as a consolation, but because it converts better.

There is not enough on the page to rank

A page with two sentences and a photograph gives a search engine almost nothing to match against. This is not about word count as a target; it is that a genuinely useful page naturally covers what it costs, how long it takes, what is included and what happens next.

Nobody has vouched for you

Links from other sites still count. For a local business the practical version is unglamorous: a claimed business profile, correct listings in the directories your trade uses, a mention from a supplier or the local chamber. This moves the needle more than most paid SEO packages sold to small businesses.

Most “we are not on Google” problems are one of three things: it is too new, something is blocking it, or the site never says the words people search for.

What to do this week

• Run the site: search. Establish which problem you have before doing anything else.
• Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. It also tells you why pages are excluded, which removes the guesswork.
• View source on your most important page and confirm your text is actually in the HTML.
• Rewrite your home page and one service page in your customers’ words, including where you work.
• Claim your business profile and make sure the name, address and phone number match your site exactly.

None of this costs money, and it resolves the large majority of cases. If you have done all of it and are still invisible after a couple of months, then it is worth paying someone to look — and you will be able to tell them what you have already ruled out.