You have a website. You have products or services to sell. But when you search for your business on Google, nothing comes up. Sound familiar?
Getting no organic traffic from Google is one of the most common problems we see on small business websites. It is rarely about competition, and much more often about basic discovery: Google either does not know your website exists, or cannot understand it well enough to rank it.
Here is how to check, and what to do about it.
Step 1: The quick Google test
Open Google and type site:yourdomain.com (replacing yourdomain.com with your actual website address). This tells Google to show you every page it has indexed from your site.
- If you see results: Google knows about your site. The number of results tells you how many pages are indexed.
- If you see nothing: Google has not indexed your site yet, or something is blocking it.
Step 2: Check for common blockers
If your site is not showing up, the most common reasons are:
- Your site is too new. Google can take days or weeks to discover a brand new website. You can speed this up by submitting your sitemap through Google Search Console.
- A noindex tag is blocking Google. Some website builders accidentally leave a "noindex" meta tag on your pages, which tells Google to ignore them. Check your page source for
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">. - You have no sitemap. A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website. Without one, Google has to guess which pages exist.
Step 3: Submit your site to Google
The fastest way to get indexed is through Google Search Console (it is free):
- Go to search.google.com/search-console
- Add your website as a property
- Submit your sitemap URL (usually
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) - Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your most important pages
What to do next
Getting indexed is step one. Ranking well is step two - and that requires solid on-page SEO, fast page speed, and a mobile-friendly design.
Run a free audit on sitesimple.io to see exactly where your website stands across SEO, performance, security, and more. It takes about 60 seconds and gives you a prioritised action plan in plain English.