You paid for a website, it looks good, and yet searching your own services brings up everyone except you. A website not showing up on Google is the most common complaint we hear from contractors, and the cause is usually one of a handful of things you can check yourself in an afternoon.
Work through them in order - each one rules out a whole category of problem, and you can do the lot in an afternoon with no tools beyond a browser.
First, is your site in Google at all?
Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google, using your own domain. What comes back is roughly what Google has stored from your site.
- Nothing at all? Google either hasn't found your site or has been told to stay away. That is the problem to fix before anything else.
- Only the homepage? Your service pages aren't being found, usually a linking or sitemap problem.
- Everything is there? Then you are not invisible, you are simply below competitors. Skip to the ranking sections further down.
The switch that hides a whole site
WordPress has a setting that asks search engines not to index the site. It exists so a site can be built in private, and it gets left on far more often than you would believe, sometimes for years after launch.
In WordPress it lives in Settings, then Reading: "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". If that box is ticked, untick it. Also check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the whole site.
Have you told Google the site exists?
Google finds most sites on its own eventually, but you can stop waiting. Set up Google Search Console, verify the site, and submit your sitemap, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml or /sitemap.xml.
Search Console is also where Google tells you what it thinks is wrong: pages it couldn't read, pages it chose not to index, and errors it hit while crawling. It is free, and for a home service business it is the single most useful tool to have open.
A new site takes time, but not forever
If your site launched last week, patience is the fix. Google has to crawl it, understand it and decide where it belongs. For a brand new domain, expect weeks before pages settle and three to six months before rankings on competitive searches move in a way you can feel. We go through the timing in our post on how long SEO takes for a home service business.
What you should not accept is silence after six months of paying someone. That is a different problem.
You have one page where you need ten
This is the big one. Most contractor sites have a home page, an about page, one "Services" page listing everything, and a contact page. Google has nothing specific to rank, because nothing on the site is clearly about drain cleaning, or AC replacement, or roof repair. Working out which of those pages are worth building first is covered in our post on keyword research for contractors.
Give every service you want calls for its own page, written for the homeowner searching that exact thing. Then give the towns you serve their own pages, with something true and specific on each. That structure is the backbone of SEO for home service businesses, and it is usually the difference between invisible and ranking.
Want more inquiries from your website?
We'll look at your website and rankings and tell you plainly what we would fix first. No charge and no sales pitch.
You are searching from the wrong place
Google results change with location, search history and the device you hold. Sitting in your office searching "plumber" shows you a map pack built around your office, not around the customer across town.
Check in a private browsing window, and remember that the map results and the regular results are two different systems. If your website ranks but your business never appears on the map, the work you need is Local SEO: your Google Business Profile, categories, service areas and reviews.
The site is slow, or broken on phones
Most people searching for a contractor are on a phone, often outdoors, often in a hurry. A site that takes many seconds to appear, or that pushes buttons off the screen, gets abandoned. Google notices sites people bounce out of.
Open your site on your own phone on mobile data, not office wifi. Time it. Try to call yourself from it. If any of that annoys you, it is costing you jobs, and it is one of the things a care plan is supposed to catch.
Your business details don't match
Old phone numbers and old addresses live on for years in directories. When your name, address and phone differ across the web, Google gets less confident about which listing is real, and confidence is a big part of local ranking.
Pick one exact format for your business name, address and phone number, then make your website, Google Business Profile and the main directories agree.
Two sites, or an old one still live
When a company rebuilds, the old site sometimes stays online on another address, or the new site launches on a different domain while the old one keeps ranking. Google then has to choose, and it may choose the version you no longer use.
Search your business name and see what comes up. Anything old should redirect to the matching page on the current site, not sit there competing with you.
Being found is half of it
Worth saying before the checklist: showing up and getting called are two different problems. Plenty of contractors solve the first and still have a quiet phone, because the page people land on was never built to convert.
So the order we work in is website design and development first, then SEO for the search results, Local SEO for the map, and conversion work to lift the number of visitors who call. One without the others tends to disappoint.
What to fix first
- Make sure nothing is blocking Google: the WordPress setting and robots.txt.
- Set up Search Console and submit your sitemap.
- Build real pages for your money services, then for your towns.
- Fix speed and the phone experience.
- Clean up your business details everywhere they appear.
- Sort out old sites and duplicate listings.
That order matters. There is no point writing new pages while a setting is telling Google to ignore the whole site.
If you would rather someone else worked through this list for you, we will look at your site and tell you plainly what is holding it back: get a free website and SEO review.
Want more inquiries from your website?
We'll look at your website and rankings and tell you plainly what we would fix first. No charge and no sales pitch.
