Why is my website not showing up on Google?

First, find out whether you are indexed at all

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, with no space after the colon. If nothing comes back, Google does not have your pages and no amount of other work will help until that is fixed. If pages come back, you are indexed and the problem is position, not existence.

Second, read your own page title

Look at the text in the browser tab on your homepage. If it says only your business name, that is very likely the whole problem. In an audit of thirty seven Louisville law firms we found thirty one whose homepage title never mentioned the service they were trying to be found for.

A search engine is being literal here rather than clever. If the page never says what you do and where you do it, it does not get shown to the person asking for exactly that.

Third, check that you have a page about the thing

A practice area or service listed in a drop down menu with no page behind it does not exist as far as search is concerned. Fourteen of those thirty seven firms advertised a service with no page for it anywhere on the site.

Fourth, and this is the hard one

If all three of the above are already right and you are still not on page one, you have run into the real barrier. In the same study, nine firms had technically perfect pages and ranked at positions two, three, five, thirteen, twenty, twenty nine, thirty two, forty, and one was not in the top forty at all.

Identical pages, thirty eight places apart. What separates them is not on the page. It is how many other sites on the internet point at them, and which ones. That is the part that takes real work, and it is the part we do.