Six months live and
still nobody finds it.

First separate two problems: invisible, or just low

These have completely different causes and fixes, and checking them together wastes a lot of effort.

The test is simple: search your full business name from someone else’s phone. If even your own name does not surface your site, that is "invisible" — usually an indexing or technical problem, causes one to three below. If your name finds you but a service plus your area ("Flushing accountant") does not, that is "low", causes four to six.

And note: results from your own phone inside your own shop do not count. Google adjusts for location and your own browsing history, so searching for yourself is always optimistic.

Six causes, easiest first

1. Google has not indexed the site at all

   The most basic and the most common. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google and see how many results come back. None at all means Google has not indexed you, and checking the other five is pointless until that is fixed. New sites usually take days to weeks; still nothing after six months means something else is wrong.

2. The site is telling Google not to index it

   The cruellest one: many sites are set during development to block search engines, and nobody unsets it at launch. The symptom is exactly the zero results above. It is a settings change that takes a minute, but someone who does not know can sit with it for half a year. Anyone building a site should check this before delivery.

3. The content only appears once JavaScript runs

   If your site is essentially blank with JavaScript turned off, what Google sees may be close to blank too. This shows up on sites built with certain tools or leaning heavily on front-end frameworks. To check: view the page source in your browser and search for a sentence from your own body text. If it is not in the source, there is a risk.

4. Every page has the same title, or none

   The title is Google’s primary signal for what a page is about. Every page titled with your company name tells Google these pages are interchangeable. Easy to check yourself: look at the browser tab text page by page. All the same? That is your problem.

5. The terms you target have no volume, or are far too hard

   Some sites do everything right but aim at a term nobody searches, or a nationwide term far out of reach. Judging whether a term is worth chasing needs volume, difficulty and commercial intent looked at together — any one alone misleads. This one needs a tool; you cannot eyeball it.

6. Too little content, or content too similar to everyone else’s

   A five-page site with two lines per page gives Google no reason to rank it above anyone. This is the slowest cause and the one with no shortcut: it needs a steady supply of genuinely useful content. If the first five check out, this is usually where you are stuck.

The first four are "things that should have been right anyway", and fixing them usually shows movement within weeks. Five and six are long-term work. The order matters: plenty of owners hire someone to write content when they are actually stuck on cause two, and pay for months of nothing.

Local businesses need one more check

If yours is a local business — restaurant, clinic, law firm, contractor, salon — a great many customers never reach you through the website at all. They reach you through Google Maps.

These are two separate systems: website ranking runs on content and technical health, map ranking runs on your business profile and reviews. It is common to have a decent website that is invisible on the map, or the reverse. So check the map separately. See how to rank on Google Maps.

For most small local businesses those three map slots are worth more than website ranking and are easier to win, because the business profile is free and yours to fill in.

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