Before you change anything, find out which problem you have. A site Google has never indexed and a site sitting on page five look identical from where you are standing, and nothing they need is the same.
Start with one search: type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If pages come back, your site is indexed and you have a ranking problem. If nothing comes back, your site is not indexed and you have a technical or discovery problem. These two look the same to you and are not remotely the same underneath.
Not indexed usually means a noindex tag left on after launch, a robots.txt rule blocking crawlers, a brand new domain nobody has linked to yet, or pages that render only in JavaScript. Not ranking usually means the page exists but has not earned the position yet, which is a content, relevance and reputation question rather than a bug.
Worth saying plainly: sometimes nothing is wrong. A three week old site that is indexed and ranks on page four for a competitive term is behaving exactly as expected.
This distinction decides everything else on this page. Get it right first, because the fixes have almost nothing in common.
site:yourdomain.com returns nothingsite:yourdomain.com returns your pagesIn rough order of how frequently each one is the real answer on a small business site.
This is the most common outcome by a distance. The site is indexed, it ranks somewhere, and the owner has never looked past the first page of results. Check Search Console: if you have impressions, Google is showing your pages to people. That is a ranking gap, not a fault, and it is closed with better pages and time rather than a fix.
noindex tag left over from the buildAlmost every site is built behind a noindex so the unfinished version does not get picked up. If nobody removes it at launch, the finished site stays invisible indefinitely. It is one line of HTML, or a checkbox in most content management systems, and it is a genuinely common cause of a site that has never appeared.
robots.txt rule blocking crawlersVisit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * asks every crawler to skip the whole site. Staging environments ship with exactly that, and it travels to production more often than anyone admits.
Worth understanding the difference: robots.txt blocks crawling, noindex blocks indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear as a bare URL with no description, because Google knows it exists but was never allowed to read it.
Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps. A new domain with no inbound links and no submitted sitemap is genuinely hard to discover. This is not a fault, it is a starting position, and it is why one real link from a directory, supplier or partner does more early on than most people expect.
Your site may be reachable at four addresses: with and without www, on http and on https. If those are not redirected into one canonical version, Google is splitting signals across duplicates. This overlaps with certificate and DNS configuration, covered under Cloudflare management.
If the page HTML is essentially empty and everything is drawn by a script, indexing gets slower and less reliable. Turn JavaScript off in your browser and reload. If the page is blank, crawlers are working harder than they should have to.
Rare, but real. Search Console reports manual actions directly under Security and Manual Actions. If your host was down when Google came by, crawling backs off, and repeated failures compound.
site: searchSearch site:yourdomain.com. Results back means indexed: skip to step five. Nothing back means not indexed: continue.
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Look for Disallow: /. If it is there and you did not put it there deliberately, you have probably found it.
Right click the page, choose View Page Source, and use your browser find function to search for noindex. Finding it on a page you want indexed is the answer. Note that it can also arrive as an HTTP header, which the page source will not show you.
This is the tool that settles it. Paste your homepage URL into Search Console and it tells you whether the URL is on Google, when it was last crawled, and if excluded, the specific reason. It replaces every guess above with a fact.
Impressions mean you are being shown. Impressions with almost no clicks mean you rank, but too low or with a listing nobody clicks. Zero impressions on an indexed site means nobody is searching for what you rank for, which is a keyword and content problem.
Put a full sentence from your page in quotes and search it. If your page comes back first, ranking works fine. You are competing for terms you have not earned yet, and that is a different job to any fix.
http, https, www and bare domain redirecting to one address.Do the checks above yourself first. They are free, they take under an hour, and they frequently end the investigation. Bring someone in when:
We diagnose before we prescribe, because the assumed problem and the real problem are different more often than not. If the answer is that nothing is broken, we will tell you that instead of selling you a fix.
noindex tags, headers and robots.txt blocks left from a buildSearch for site:yourdomain.com in Google. If results come back, Google has your pages and the problem is ranking, not indexing. If nothing comes back, Google either does not know the site exists or has been told to leave it out. Those are different problems with different fixes, and the site: search takes five seconds to settle it.
The site: operator is a rough indicator, not a precise report. For a specific page, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which tells you what Google actually did with that URL.
Then it is a ranking problem, and ranking is competitive rather than binary. Try searching for a long, specific phrase from your own page text in quotes. If your page comes up for that, you are ranking, just not for anything competitive yet. That usually points at content, relevance, reputation and time rather than a technical fault.
There is no fixed number, and anyone quoting one is guessing. A brand new domain with no links pointing at it can take weeks to be crawled and settled. Submitting the URL in Search Console and having at least one real link from somewhere else on the web both help Google find you sooner. If several weeks pass and site: still returns nothing, stop waiting and start diagnosing.
No, and neither can anyone else. Organic placement is not for sale and search engines do not publish their ranking systems in full. What can be committed to is the work: the faults that block indexing get found and fixed, the pages get built to answer real questions, and everything gets measured so you can see what actually changed. See local SEO for how that work runs.
No. Ads and organic results are separate systems. Buying ads gets you into the ad slots for as long as you pay, and it can be a sensible way to buy visibility while the slower organic work matures. It does not move your organic position.
See how Google actually crawls, indexes and ranks your pages.
The crawling, indexing and structure work search engines depend on.
Get found by people searching for your service near you.
What the common reports mean, and which ones are not problems.
Rebuild an existing site without losing the rankings you already have.
The steps that matter for getting found locally.
Send us your domain and the searches you expect to appear in. We will tell you whether it is an indexing fault, a ranking gap, or nothing at all.