Why is my website not showing up on Google?

First, work out which problem you have

There are two completely different problems that feel identical from the outside, and the fixes have nothing in common.

Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google, using your own domain. If you get a list of your pages back, Google knows you exist and the issue is that you are not ranking well enough to be seen. If you get nothing, Google has not indexed you at all.

If you are not indexed at all

In rough order of how often we find each one:

• The site is very new. Give it two to four weeks and submit it in Google Search Console rather than waiting to be found.
• robots.txt is blocking crawlers. Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt — if it says "Disallow: /" you are telling Google to stay out. This is startlingly common after a site goes live from staging.
• A noindex tag is still in place. WordPress has a "Discourage search engines" checkbox that developers tick during a build and forget to untick. It is under Settings, Reading.
• The site has never been submitted to Search Console and has no links pointing at it, so nothing has led Google to it.
• The content is loaded entirely by JavaScript that the crawler never executes, so the page appears empty.
• A previous owner earned a manual penalty on the domain.

If you are indexed but not ranking

Different problem, different causes:

• You have no page targeting the term. If you want to rank for "emergency electrician Mansfield" you need a page about emergency electrical work in Mansfield, not a homepage mentioning it once.
• Your competitors are simply better established. Ranking is relative, not absolute.
• The site is too slow, particularly on mobile, and Google is favouring faster alternatives.
• Everything is on one page. Five services on one page ranks for none of them well.
• No Google Business Profile, so you are absent from the map pack where most local searches are decided.
• You are checking while logged in and in your own town, which gives a personalised result. Check in an incognito window.

The five-minute self-check

Before paying anyone, do this yourself:

• Search site:yourdomain.co.uk — how many pages come back?
• Visit yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt — does it disallow anything important?
• Open your site on a phone on mobile data and count the seconds until it is usable.
• Search your business name — do you appear at all, including the Google Business Profile?
• Set up Google Search Console if you have not. It is free and it will tell you directly what Google thinks of your site.