You built the site. You paid for hosting. You told people the URL. But when you search for your own business on Google, nothing. Or worse, a competitor shows up where you should be.
Here are the most common reasons your website isn’t showing up, in order of how likely they are.
Google hasn’t indexed your site yet
A new website doesn’t appear in Google the moment it goes live. Googlebot has to find it, crawl it, and decide it’s worth including in search results. That process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
If your site is brand new, check Google Search Console. Under Coverage (or Indexing), you’ll see whether your pages have been indexed. If they haven’t, you can submit your sitemap and request indexing manually.
Your site is set to ‘discourage search engines’
This one catches a lot of people. In WordPress, there’s a setting under Settings > Reading that says ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site.’ It’s designed for development environments. If someone ticked it and forgot to untick it, Google will ignore your entire site.
Check it now. Seriously.
You have no backlinks and very little content
Google ranks pages it trusts. Trust comes from other credible sites linking to yours, from the quality and depth of your content, and from how long your domain has been active. Understanding how Google weighs these signals helps explain why a new site with five pages struggles even with good content.
This doesn’t mean SEO is hopeless. It means it takes time, consistent content, and building up your site’s authority gradually.
Your pages aren’t targeting the right search terms
You might rank perfectly well for your exact business name while appearing nowhere for the phrases your potential clients actually type. ‘Graphic designer Johannesburg’ is a very different search from your business name.
Look at each page on your site and ask: what would someone type into Google if they needed exactly what this page offers? That phrase should appear in your page title, your first heading, and naturally throughout the body copy.
Technical issues are blocking Google
Broken pages, slow load times, incorrect robots.txt files, and messy redirects can all stop Google from seeing your content properly. Our on-page SEO checklist covers the technical elements worth checking first.
You’re trying to rank for terms that are too competitive
‘Wedding photographer’ is competitive. ‘Wedding photographer Bryanston with a documentary style’ is not. Smaller, more specific phrases are easier to rank for and often attract better-qualified visitors.
It’s also worth understanding whether you need local or national SEO — that decision shapes which phrases are worth targeting.
Read next
If Google can find your site but you’re still not ranking, read about how Google actually decides where to rank websites. And work through our on-page SEO checklist to see what’s worth fixing on your existing pages.
Need a hand?
We offer an SEO Once-Over that goes through your site and tells you exactly what’s holding you back. No jargon, just a clear report and a prioritised list of fixes. Get in touch.
