If your website does not appear when you search for what you do, the cause is usually one of a handful of specific, checkable things. Most of them you can diagnose yourself in under an hour, and knowing which one you are dealing with changes what you should do about it.
There is an important distinction to establish first, because the two problems look identical from the outside and have completely different fixes.
Not indexed means Google does not have your page at all. Indexed but not ranking means Google has it and has decided other pages deserve to be shown first. The first is technical and often fixable quickly. The second is competitive and takes longer.
Step one: find out whether Google has your pages
Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google. This returns roughly the pages Google holds for your site. It is not exhaustive or precise, but it answers the only question that matters at this stage.
If nothing comes back, or far fewer pages than you have, the problem is indexing and you should keep reading. If most of your pages appear, skip to the ranking section further down.
Check whether you are blocking search engines
WordPress has a single checkbox, under Settings then Reading, labelled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. It is intended for sites still in development. If it is left ticked when a site goes live, the entire site stays out of search results indefinitely, and nothing about the site itself looks wrong.
This is more common than it sounds, because the person who built the site and the person who launched it are often not the same person. It costs nothing to check, and it is the first thing to rule out.
Check your robots.txt
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. This file tells crawlers which parts of the site they may request. A line reading Disallow: / blocks everything. Rules left over from a staging environment are a frequent culprit here, and they survive the move to production unnoticed.
Check for noindex tags on individual pages
A page can be excluded on its own, separately from the site-wide setting. In most SEO plugins this is a per-page toggle that is easy to set by accident. If one important page is missing while the rest are fine, this is where to look.
Make sure you have a sitemap, and that Google knows about it
An XML sitemap lists the pages you want indexed. It does not force anything, but it substantially helps discovery, particularly on a new site with few links pointing at it. Most SEO plugins generate one automatically at /sitemap_index.xml or similar. Submit it in Google Search Console.
If you are not using Search Console yet, set it up before doing anything else in this list. It reports directly on what Google has found, what it has excluded, and why — which turns all of the guesswork above into a straight answer.
Give a new site time
A brand-new domain with no external links takes a while to be discovered and crawled. If the site launched last week and everything above checks out, the answer may simply be patience. Requesting indexing for your most important pages in Search Console can help move that along.
If you are indexed but still not found
This is the more common situation, and it is a different problem. Google has your pages and is choosing not to show them prominently. Usually one of these explains it.
The page does not clearly match what anyone searches for
Pages built around internal language — service names only you use, slogans, abstractions — are hard to match against real queries. A page needs to state plainly what it is about, in the words customers actually type. This sounds obvious and is very frequently the whole problem.
One page is trying to cover everything
A single page listing eight services will rarely rank well for any of them. Each distinct thing you want to be found for generally needs its own page with enough substance to be the best available answer for that specific question.
You are competing above your weight
Broad, national terms are contested by sites with years of accumulated authority. More specific and more local variations are both easier to win and usually closer to a purchase decision. “Emergency plumber in Racine” is a more realistic and more valuable target than “plumber”.
The site is slow, or awkward on a phone
Most local searches happen on mobile. A page that loads slowly or is difficult to use on a phone loses visitors regardless of where it ranks, and page experience feeds into how a site performs in search.
Nothing links to you
Links from other websites remain one of the ways Google judges whether a site is established. A site nobody references has little to distinguish it. This is the slowest of these factors to improve and the hardest to shortcut honestly.
Working through it in order
Start with Search Console, because it removes the guessing. Then rule out the blocking settings — the reading checkbox, robots.txt, per-page noindex — since those are quick and occasionally explain everything at once. Only then move to the slower work of content and authority.
It is worth resisting the urge to start with content. Writing more pages while the site is technically blocked from being indexed produces nothing at all, and it is a genuinely common way to waste several months.
Want someone to check it properly?
We can look at whether your site is indexed, what is blocking it if not, and which pages are closest to ranking. A straightforward assessment of where the problem actually sits — no guaranteed rankings, because as Google says, nobody can offer those.