Step 1: Check whether you're on Google at all
Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google, using your own domain. Everything Google has indexed will be listed.
If you see your pages, you are on Google — the issue is ranking, not indexing. If you see nothing, Google either doesn't know about the site or has been told not to include it. Work through the next two steps.
Step 2: Make sure nothing is blocking you
- A robots.txt file with Disallow: / blocks every crawler — a common leftover from a site being built
- A noindex tag on a page tells Google to leave it out, even if it can read it
- Password protection or a staging setting keeps the whole site private
- Content that only appears after a login can't be indexed
- Broken internal links can leave pages with no route in
Step 3: Set up Google Search Console
Search Console is free and it's the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Add your domain, verify ownership using the method your host or platform supports, and submit your sitemap — usually at yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml.
Once verified, the Pages report shows what's indexed and why anything isn't. The URL Inspection tool lets you ask Google to look at a specific page again after you've fixed something. Neither speeds up rankings, but both remove the guesswork.
Step 4: Give Google something to rank
Plenty of small business sites are perfectly crawlable and still invisible, because every page says roughly the same vague thing. A homepage headline of "Quality service, competitive prices" tells a search engine nothing about what you do or where.
Each page needs one clear subject, a title that names it, a heading that matches, and enough real content to answer the question someone typed. That's usually the difference between indexed and actually found.
The basics that matter most
| Element | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Page title | Names the service and place, under about 60 characters |
| Meta description | A natural sentence or two that makes the right person click |
| H1 heading | One per page, matching what the page is really about |
| URL | Short and readable, e.g. /services/bathroom-fitting |
| Body content | Written for a customer first, with the obvious wording included naturally |
| Internal links | Real links with descriptive wording, not "click here" |
| Speed | Compressed images and fast loading on a phone |
How long indexing takes
A brand new site typically gets picked up within a few days to a few weeks. New pages on an established site are usually faster. Ranking is slower — expect a few months before a new page settles into a stable position, longer in competitive areas. Nothing legitimate makes this instant.
When the real problem is the website itself
If your pages are indexed, your titles are sensible and you still get nothing, the site itself may be the limitation: a single page trying to cover six services, content copied from a supplier, or a build so slow on mobile that visitors leave before it loads. At that point more SEO effort on a weak foundation is wasted money — the rebuild is the fix.
What I include as standard
Every site I build ships with proper titles and descriptions on each page, a single clear H1, a working sitemap, a robots file that doesn't block anything by accident, compressed images and fast mobile loading. I'll also help you get Search Console connected so you can see what Google is doing. That's the foundation, not a ranking promise.