The managing director types the trade and the town into a search engine. Up come five competitors, two directories and one company that went under a year ago. Their own site is nowhere. It exists, it has been running for three years and somebody pays for the hosting every month.
This article is a diagnosis, not an SEO guide. Eight causes, how to tell which one is yours, and what to do about it. Most of them you can check yourself in twenty minutes and only one is a job for a specialist.
Short answer
- First separate two different things: whether the search engine does not know you, or knows you and ranks you lower. Nine companies out of ten have the second problem and treat the first.
- Whether it knows you takes ten seconds: type site:yourdomain.com into the search box.
- Do not search for yourself in your own browser. The engine knows your history and your location and will show you higher than a stranger sees you.
- Google states in its own documentation that indexing is not guaranteed, even for a site that meets every technical requirement.
- The most common cause is not technical. It is content answering different questions from the ones people type.
Three tests that decide what you are actually dealing with
These are two different illnesses with one symptom and the treatments are opposites. Before doing anything else, find out which one you have. It takes five minutes.
| Test | How | What the result means |
|---|---|---|
| Are you indexed | Type site:yourdomain.com into the search box | Nothing: it does not know the site, go to causes 1 and 2. Something: it knows you and this is about ranking |
| Do they find you by name | Search the exact company name | They do not: an index or brand problem. They do: the index is fine |
| Do they find you by trade | Search what a customer would type | This is where the real position shows. Go to causes 3 to 8 |
Eight causes, ordered by how often they actually occur
1. The site forbids indexing
How you can tell: the site: test finds nothing even though the site has been up for months.
During the build, search engines are blocked so an unfinished version does not appear in results. After launch somebody forgets to remove the block. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for a Disallow: / line, or a noindex tag in the page source. The fix takes ten minutes; indexing then takes days to weeks.
It is a rare cause but the most expensive in wasted time: we have seen sites sit like that for two years.
2. The domain is new, or the site moved without redirects
How you can tell: the site is younger than a few weeks, or traffic dropped off a cliff on the exact day the new version launched.
A new site is not indexed immediately, and Google's documentation says it makes no predictions or guarantees about when or whether a URL will be indexed. On a new domain, count on weeks.
The worse version is a move. Addresses changed, the old ones return errors, and three years of accumulated position is hanging on an address that no longer exists. Waiting will not fix that; a redirect map will.
3. You are searching for yourself and the engine is lying to you
How you can tell: you find the site, your sales rep does not. Or the other way round.
The engine knows your location and your history. A site you visit daily gets shown to you higher. A company convinced it ranks first is often on page three for a stranger, and a company convinced nobody can find it may be first, just under a different phrase than the one it tried.
Check in a private window, on mobile data, and ideally have somebody outside the company try it too.
4. You are indexed, just on page five
How you can tell: the site: test finds your pages, the company name brings you up first, the trade term does not bring you up at all.
The most common state of all, and technically everything is fine. On the query you care about there are simply ten better answers. That is not a fault to be fixed, that is competition to be overtaken, and only better content does it.
In traffic terms, page two of the results is the same as not existing. The gap between first and fifth position is not tens of percent, it is an order of magnitude.
How many people click, by position in the results
Range in per cent
| Label | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| Position 1 | 20% | 40% |
| Position 2 | 12% | 19% |
| Position 3 | 8% | 11% |
| Positions 4 to 10 | 2% | 7% |
| Page 2 and beyond | 0% | 1% |
5. The content answers different questions from the ones people type
How you can tell: they find you by company name but not by trade, and the words a customer would use appear nowhere on the site.
This is the most common real cause at companies whose sites are technically fine. Company websites are written from the inside out: they talk about heritage, certifications and machinery. The customer is not looking for your heritage, they are looking for a solution to their problem, in words that would never occur to you.
A classic example: the company sells “surface treatment technology systems” and people search for “powder coating line”. Both are correct; only one of them gets typed into a search box.
What to do: ask five customers how they would look for you if they did not know you. Not what you do, but what they would type. Those words then need a page of their own, not one paragraph among others.
6. You have no page for that query
How you can tell: you offer five services and have one “Services” page with three paragraphs.
A search engine does not show websites, it shows pages. When a competitor has a page per service with prices, process and examples and you have one paragraph, there is nothing to compare.
It is also the cheapest fix on the list, because the text usually already exists, just merged together.
7. Technical obstacles
How you can tell: switch JavaScript off in your browser and the page goes blank. Or the site is slow enough on a phone that you wait seconds.
Content painted in by a script may be seen by a crawler, but not reliably. A slow site gets crawled less often. And a page with no link pointing at it from anywhere on the site shows up only if it is in the sitemap.
This is the one item that usually needs a supplier. The rest a company can handle itself.
8. A manual action or a hacked site
How you can tell: the site used to be visible and stopped being, or pages you never created show up in the results.
Rare, but real. A manual action appears in its own section of Search Console with the reason stated. Most often it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with whoever did the SEO five years ago and bought links. The other version is a hacked site with somebody else's content injected into your pages.
The honest part: sometimes they find you and it changes nothing
There is a ninth possibility your SEO supplier will not raise: nobody types your query.
A company wants to rank first for a phrase it uses internally and which five people a month search for nationwide. Ranking first on it is easy and worth nothing. A query a thousand people search every month, on the other hand, is usually held by portals and directories and takes years of work.
Before paying for anything, check two things:
- Whether anybody types that query at all. The search box autocomplete is a crude but free indicator: what it suggests is what people search.
- Whether the first page shows competitors or directories. When it is full of large portals, it is cheaper to pick a narrower query you can win than to fight for years over the broad one.
A company that ranks first on ten narrow queries usually does better than one ranking tenth on a single broad one.
A company complained for three years that Google could not find it. Nobody had ever tried site: or set up Search Console. Twenty minutes in, it turned out robots.txt still carried the block from the build.
A company ran the three tests, found it was indexed and came up on its own name. The problem was five services sharing one page. They were split into five, each with its own query, and within six months enquiries were arriving from four of them.
What to do, and in what order
The order is not arbitrary. The first three steps are free and they decide whether spending on the rest makes any sense.
- 1Run the three tests from the table above, in a private window rather than your everyday browser. Write the result down, because everything else follows from it.
- 2Set up Search Console and verify the domain. It is free, verification is one DNS setting or one file on the site, and from that moment you can see what people actually find you for and where you sit. Without it you are arguing about impressions.
- 3Check robots.txt and the noindex tag. Ten minutes of work that rules out the most embarrassing possible cause.
- 4Ask five customers how they would search for you if they did not know you. Write their words down verbatim, not translated into company language.
- 5Compare those words with the site. If they appear nowhere, you have your cause and a list of the pages that are missing.
- 6Only now deal with the technical side: speed, script rendered content, the sitemap, internal links. And only now is it worth calling a supplier.
How we handle it
- The check is free and comes back by the next day. We go through the eight causes and tell you which one is yours, even when the answer is that one line needs fixing and you order nothing from us.
- A site we build starts from customer words, not company terminology. The page structure follows what people ask about, and that work happens before any code is written, not after.
- Search Console and analytics go in at launch, not when somebody asks why no enquiries arrive. Without measurement, traffic is guesswork.
- We build so that content does not wait for JavaScript, which means the crawler sees what a person sees.
And the honest other side: we promise nobody the first position. Anybody who does either knows the query has no volume or is counting on you forgetting in a year. What can be promised is measurable improvement and the ability to see what is happening.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find out whether my site is in Google?
Type site: followed immediately by your domain with no space, for example site:yourcompany.com. If nothing shows up, the engine does not know the site. The listing is not exhaustive and the result count is an estimate, so for a specific page use the URL inspection tool in Search Console, which says exactly whether it is indexed and what is standing in the way.
How long before a new site appears in search?
On a new domain, usually weeks. Google's documentation says it makes no predictions or guarantees about when or whether a URL will be indexed, and that meeting every technical requirement still does not guarantee inclusion. Requesting a crawl in Search Console speeds things up but guarantees nothing.
Why can I find the site when my customer cannot?
Because the engine knows your location and history and ranks pages you visit higher for you. Check in a private window, on a different connection, and have somebody outside the company try. The gap between what you see and what a stranger sees is often several positions.
What is the most common reason a company cannot be found?
Not technology but content that answers different questions from the ones people type. Company websites are written from the inside out in industry terminology, while customers search for a solution to their problem in their own words. The second most common cause is having no dedicated page for the query at all.
Will listing in directories help?
Only a little, and it does not address any of the causes in this article. A listing in a major national directory is worth having for the people who use it, not for search position. Offers of a listing for thousands with a promise of top rankings are usually badly overpriced for what they deliver.
What does it cost to have this fixed?
It depends which of the eight causes it is. A block in robots.txt is ten minutes. Missing service pages are a matter of copy and a few days of work. Lost positions after a move are fixed with a redirect map and tend to be the expensive case, because what pointed where has to be reconstructed.
Can you guarantee first place in search?
No, and nobody serious will. Ranking is decided by the engine on hundreds of signals that keep changing, and no position can be bought or promised. What can be promised is measurable improvement on specific queries and the ability to see what is happening to your traffic.
Summary
- First separate whether the engine does not know you or knows you and ranks you lower. Nine out of ten have the second problem.
- Three free tests: site:, the company name and the trade term, always in a private window.
- An indexing block left over from the build is a rare but embarrassing cause. Checking takes ten minutes.
- The most common real cause is content written in company terminology instead of customer words.
- A search engine shows pages, not websites. Five services on one page means none of them properly.
- In traffic terms, page two of the results is the same as not existing.
- Sometimes the true answer is that nobody searches that query. Check that before you start paying.
Want to know which of the eight is yours
Send us the site address and one sentence about what the company does. By the next day you will have whether you are indexed, what people find you for today and which of the eight is holding you back most. No invoice, and no need for us to build you a new site to do it.
Sources and a note on the figures
- Google Search technical requirements: meeting them does not guarantee indexing
- Asking Google to recrawl: it guarantees neither inclusion nor an immediate response
- Search Console, the URL inspection tool and the manual actions section
The ranges in the chart come from publicly available click-through studies from 2024 to 2026. Those figures differ between sources by tens of percent depending on methodology, query type and whether an AI overview sat above the results. Hence ranges: a single figure would look more precise than the data actually is. For a decision, the order of magnitude between page one and page two is enough.