Your Business Website Isn't Showing Up on Google? 8 Things to Check

“We have a website, but when I Google us, we’re nowhere.” It’s one of the most common things a Las Vegas business owner says about their site — and one of the most fixable, once you know which problem you actually have.

Because “not showing up on Google” is really three different problems wearing the same coat:

• An indexing problem — Google doesn’t have your pages at all.
• A ranking problem — Google has your pages, but shows them on page four.
• A local visibility problem — the map results are their own system, separate from the regular results below them.

The checks below work through all three, in the order that finds problems fastest. Most take five minutes and cost nothing. And an important honesty note up front: fixing a technical problem removes a barrier — it doesn’t guarantee a ranking. Anyone who promises otherwise is selling something.

Check 1: Does Google Have Your Site at All?

Type this into Google, replacing the domain with yours:

site:yourbusiness.com

If your pages appear, Google knows about your site — your problem is ranking, not indexing, and you can skip to Check 3. If nothing appears, you have an indexing problem, and nothing else matters until that’s solved. A brand-new site can take days or weeks to be discovered, especially with no links pointing to it; a site that’s been live for months and still shows nothing usually means something is blocking Google — which is Check 2.

Check 2: Is Your Site Accidentally Telling Google to Go Away?

This happens more than anyone would believe. Website builders and developers routinely switch off search visibility while a site is under construction — a “discourage search engines” checkbox, a noindex tag, a robots.txt file that blocks everything — and then forget to switch it back on at launch.

Two quick looks:

• Visit yourbusiness.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / on a line by itself, your site is telling crawlers not to read any of it.
• View your homepage’s source (right-click → “View page source”) and search for the word noindex. If it’s there, your site is explicitly asking to be left out of results.

A Las Vegas salon we’ll invent for this example — launched eight months ago, zero Google presence — would, more often than not, turn out to have exactly this: the builder’s “hide from search engines” setting still on from day one. If reading source code isn’t your idea of a Tuesday, this is one of the things a website review checks in the first ten minutes.

Check 3: Do Your Pages Say What You Do and Where?

Google ranks pages for searches they plausibly answer. A surprising number of small-business websites never actually say, in plain text, what the business does and where.

Look at your homepage’s browser-tab title. If it reads “Home” or just “Welcome — Smith LLC,” Google has almost nothing to work with. A mobile detailing company whose homepage title is “Smith Enterprises” is invisible for “mobile detailing las vegas” — not penalized, just never in the running. The title, the main heading, and the opening text should say the trade and the area in words a customer would type.

Check 4: Does Each Important Service Have Real Content?

Google ranks pages, not businesses. If you’re a contractor who does kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels, and flooring, and your entire web presence is one homepage with a bulleted list — there is no kitchen-remodel page for Google to rank when someone searches for one.

The fix isn’t fifty thin pages; it’s a real page for each of your core three-to-five services, with enough useful content to deserve the visit. This is the single most common structural gap we see, and it’s covered in more depth in what contractors and trades actually need from a website — the logic applies to most service businesses, not just trades.

Check 5: Is Your Local Relevance Actually on the Page?

Las Vegas adds a wrinkle most cities don’t have: Google has learned that many “las vegas” searches come from tourists, and local-service results behave accordingly. A business in Summerlin shouldn’t expect to blanket the whole valley for a competitive search just by existing.

What you can control is whether your pages are unambiguous about where you work: the areas you serve, named in real sentences, consistent with your contact details. A website that never mentions its own city is asking Google to guess — and the map listings above the regular results are a separate system with its own rules, which is why a profile alone was never the whole job and the website side has to carry its share.

Check 6: Does Anything Credible Reference Your Business?

Google weighs whether the rest of the web corroborates that your business exists and matters: links from real websites, consistent listings in legitimate directories, your clients or partners mentioning you. A site nothing links to isn’t penalized — it just has nothing vouching for it, which in a competitive market works out the same.

This one has no overnight fix, and the shortcuts (buying links, spam directories) genuinely backfire. The legitimate version is slower: a handful of real directory listings, partners who credit you, and content worth referencing.

Check 7: Can Google Actually Read Your Pages?

Sometimes the content exists and nothing is blocked — but the pages themselves fight the crawler: they take six-plus seconds to load, the text only appears after heavy scripts run, images carry the content with no readable text at all, or half the internal links are broken.

You don’t need to diagnose this by feel. The complimentary Website Check measures how your site actually loads for a real visitor — speed, mobile experience, security basics — in plain English. If the report comes back ugly, you’ve likely found a real barrier; if your site is old enough that fixing it means fighting the platform, that’s a different conversation.

Check 8: Measure With Search Console, Not Vibes

“I Googled us and we weren’t there” is unreliable evidence — your own search history, your location, and the tourist-vs-resident wrinkle all bend what you personally see.

Google Search Console is Google’s own free report of the truth: which pages are indexed, which searches showed your site (impressions), where it ranked, and what got clicked. The pattern tells you which problem you have — no impressions at all points to Checks 1–2; impressions but position 50+ points to Checks 3–6; decent positions but no clicks is a different problem entirely: your site showing up and still not getting calls.

If no one’s ever set up Search Console for your site, that’s a fifteen-minute job and part of the search foundation every site should ship with.

The Short Version

1. site: search — is anything indexed?
2. robots.txt and noindex — are you blocking Google by accident?
3. Do titles and headings say what you do and where?
4. Does each core service have its own real page?
5. Is your service area stated plainly and consistently?
6. Does anything credible link to or list your business?
7. Do the pages load fast enough to be read at all?
8. Is Search Console set up, and what does its data say?

Want a Second Set of Eyes?

If you’d rather not play detective, this is exactly what the complimentary preview covers: I’ll look at your site’s indexing, content, and technical health the way Google sees it and tell you plainly which of these eight is actually in your way — including when the honest answer is “nothing’s broken; it just needs time or content.” Tell me about your business and I’ll take a look.