There are two different problems hiding behind this question, and the fix is completely different depending on which one you have.
Problem one: Google does not know your site exists. Nothing shows up at all, for any search, including your own business name.
Problem two: Google knows your site exists but ranks it below your competitors. You appear if you search your exact business name, but never for anything a customer would actually type.
Start with the sixty-second test that tells you which one you have.
The test: search site:yourdomain.com
Type this into Google, replacing the domain with your own:
site:yourdomain.com- Zero results → Google has not indexed you. Problem one. Work through reasons 1–5 below.
- Some results, but pages are missing → partial indexing. Reasons 3–6.
- All your pages are there → you are indexed, this is a ranking problem. Skip to reasons 7–9.
Reasons your site is not indexed
1. The site is too new
Google needs to discover, crawl, and index a new domain. This takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks. If your site launched last Tuesday, this is probably all that is happening.
Fix: set up Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your homepage. This is the single most useful thing you can do and most small business sites have never done it.
2. A noindex tag is blocking you
This is the most common self-inflicted wound in SEO. Staging sites are built with indexing switched off, and someone forgets to switch it back on at launch.
Check: view your page source and search for noindex. In WordPress, check Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". If that box is ticked, untick it.
3. robots.txt is blocking crawlers
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine to stay out of the entire site.
4. No internal links to the page
Google finds pages by following links. A page that nothing links to — no menu item, no footer link, no link from another article — is very hard to discover, even with a sitemap.
Fix: every page worth ranking should be reachable within three clicks of your homepage.
5. Server errors or a broken site
If your host was down when Google tried to crawl, or pages return 500 errors, indexing stalls. Check the Pages report in Search Console for crawl errors.
Set up Google Search Console before doing anything else. Almost every question in this article is answered directly by it, and it is free.
Reasons you are indexed but not ranking
6. Your pages do not target anything specific
A page titled "Services" that describes six different things ranks for nothing, because it is about nothing in particular. Search engines rank pages, not businesses.
Fix: one page, one topic, one primary query. If you do web design and SEO, that is two pages, not one.
7. You are aiming at queries you cannot win
"Web design" as a query is contested by agencies with a decade of history and tens of thousands of backlinks. A new site will not enter that race, no matter how good the content is.
Fix: go longer-tail and more specific. "Shopware migration for software resellers" has less volume and vastly less competition — and the people searching it are much closer to buying. This is covered in more depth in our guide to SEO for a brand new website.
8. The content is thin
A 200-word service page competing against a 2,000-word page that answers every related question will lose. Not because length is a ranking factor, but because the longer page genuinely answers more of what the searcher wanted.
9. Nobody links to you
Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals. A brand new domain with zero links has no authority, and no amount of on-page work fully compensates.
Fix: this is slow, honest work. Client footer credits, directory profiles, being genuinely useful in communities where your customers are, and eventually publishing something original enough that people cite it.
The order to fix things in
- Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap.
- Confirm nothing is blocking indexing —
noindex, robots.txt. - Give each important page one clear target query and a matching title tag.
- Make sure every page is linked from somewhere in your navigation.
- Improve the thinnest pages before writing new ones.
- Start earning links.
Steps 1–4 can be done in an afternoon. Steps 5–6 are the actual job, and they take months.