Why is my busi­ness not show­ing up on Google? The dig­i­tal land­scape has changed our world for­ev­er. Busi­ness­es are opt­ing for e‑commerce trad­ing rather than high street shops, just like con­sumers are pre­fer­ring to buy online. We use our phones for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, nav­i­ga­tion, con­sump­tion, and gath­er­ing information.

To keep up with these dig­i­tal demands, busi­ness­es must learn the ropes if they are to sur­vive. Though the inter­net has been around since the 1980s, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is chang­ing by the year.

Amongst all the chaos of SEO, PPC adver­tis­ing, con­tent mar­ket­ing, and social media, there lies one basic thing: at the very least, you want your busi­ness and web­site to show up on Google. But a sur­pris­ing num­ber of us can’t even achieve that.

You may have just launched your site but can’t see it in search engines, or it’s been around for a while, and you’ve noticed your pages have dis­ap­peared or dra­mat­i­cal­ly dropped in the rank­ings. It might be that your Google Maps rank­ing has suf­fered or disappeared.

Don’t fear! There are many sim­ple rea­sons and solu­tions for these issues, which we’ll go through now.

Why is my business not showing up on Google Search?

Technical Reasons

1. Your website is too new

Google and oth­er search engines won’t dis­cov­er your web­site as soon as you launch it – there will be a delay of a few weeks at least. If you’d like to check if your web­site actu­al­ly exists, you can search for it in this for­mat: “site:yourwebsite.com” If there aren’t any results, it means that the search engine does­n’t know about your site yet. Even if there’s just one result, and it’s a page of your site, that’s a good sign: the search engine knows about your web­site and is begin­ning to index it. Alter­na­tive­ly, you might want to check a par­tic­u­lar web page’s sta­tus. To check that it’s known by a search engine, you can search for it in this format:

To encour­age search engines to find your pages, you can cre­ate a sitemap for Google Search Con­sole. First, you’ll have to cre­ate a free account with the tool, but it’ll be valu­able in the future. If you’re unable to find your web­site by search­ing with key­words you’re tar­get­ing, but you can via the meth­ods list­ed above, it’s like­ly your new site has been put in Google Sand­box. This is a kind of pro­ba­tion zone for new web pages cre­at­ed by search engines imple­ment­ing cer­tain restric­tions. Though frus­trat­ing for you, it’s just a peri­od of a few weeks for Google to see whether you’re rel­e­vant or not.

2. You’ve accidentally blocked search engines from crawling your pages

Crawl­ing is an essen­tial com­po­nent of your web­site’s rela­tion­ship with search engines. Search engine bots crawl web­sites so that they can under­stand them bet­ter and show them to inter­net users who will find them most use­ful. Web devel­op­ers add a “robots.txt.” file to tell search engines where they’re allowed to go on your site. If there are cer­tain URLs blocked by this file, Google won’t be able to crawl them and show them on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google Search Con­sole can help in this sce­nario (if Google has pre­vi­ous­ly tried to crawl your site), as it will alert you to the pres­ence of this file under the Cov­er­age report. If your web­site is new, Google may not have tried to crawl it yet. In this case, you can still check for the “robots.txt” file by search­ing for: “yourdomain.com/robots.txt” When look­ing at the code, watch out for any of the fol­low­ing: Dis­al­low: /blog/ (or any oth­er impor­tant site pages) Dis­al­low: / User-agent: * Dis­al­low: / User-agent: Googlebot

3. You’ve accidentally blocked search engines from indexing your pages

In a sim­i­lar way to the issue above, you could be telling search engines to hide cer­tain pages from inter­net users. To check whether you’ve done this, take a look at your HTML code. If there’s this meta tag: “noin­dex”, then the page won’t be indexed regard­less of any oth­er pos­i­tive steps you’ve tak­en. The “noin­dex” meta tag can be help­ful in web­site devel­op­ment stages, but some­times devel­op­ers can for­get to remove it.

SEO Reasons

It might be that your site is show­ing up on Google, just not very high up. In that case, you’ll need to inves­ti­gate SEO rea­sons so you can get to the bot­tom of it. Here are some things to look out for:

1. Your content doesn’t align with search intent

Above all, Google wants to pro­vide its users with the most use­ful and rel­e­vant results accord­ing to their search queries. That’s why care­ful key­word research lies at the heart of con­tent mar­ket­ing and SEO. It’s so impor­tant to leave sig­nals in your con­tent that tell Google who your tar­get audi­ence is and answer those tar­get search queries in the most rel­e­vant way. Think­ing about search intent and how you can best pro­vide solu­tions is the only way Google will see you as a valu­able source of infor­ma­tion for its users. If you want to align your con­tent with search intent, you might like to hire a con­tent mar­keter or SEO strate­gist to guide you through key­word research and con­tent creation.

2. Lack of high-quality backlinks

Though there are many pos­i­tive actions you can take to improve your site’s rank­ing posi­tion, back­links are one of the strongest fac­tors. If there aren’t any prac­ti­cal or tech­ni­cal block­ages pre­vent­ing your site from rank­ing well, it does­n’t mean it’ll shoot right to the top. You’ll still need to take fur­ther steps to prove that you’re a high-qual­i­ty source of infor­ma­tion that will pro­vide help­ful and rel­e­vant con­tent. Take a look at page 1 results for a search term you’re try­ing to rank for. If these pages have more back­links than yours, you might want to con­sid­er a back­link­ing strat­e­gy to improve your chances of com­pet­ing with these top-rank­ing results.

3. You have a slow-loading site

If you’ve ever hired an  SEO con­sul­tant, you’ll know that they usu­al­ly check site speed first. It might seem like a small thing, but it real­ly should­n’t be ignored. There’s a rea­son these pro­fes­sion­als check it first. Slow site load­ing speed could be the only thing stand­ing in the way of your web­site rank­ing on page 1 of Google. Since Google wants to pro­vide a qual­i­ty brows­ing expe­ri­ence for its users, it won’t rec­om­mend slow or poor­ly func­tion­ing web­sites as this con­tra­dicts its aims.

4. You’ve been penalised

If you did­n’t know your web­site could be penalised by search engines, check out Google’s Web­mas­ter Guide­lines.

You can be penalised both man­u­al­ly and algo­rith­mi­cal­ly, although the lat­ter bet­ter resem­bles a fil­ter. Man­u­al penal­ties are actioned by a Google employ­ee, where­as algo­rith­mic penal­ties are car­ried out by Google itself.

One rea­son you could be penalised is pla­gia­rism. Busi­ness­es that are endeav­our­ing into a con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paign might make the mis­take of reusing their own con­tent. For instance, you might have two blogs – one on your web­site and one on LinkedIn Publishing.

Although it’s more effort, it’s worth recre­at­ing your blog con­tent for these plat­forms as repeat­ed con­tent will be detect­ed by Google. It does­n’t mat­ter that it comes from the same source; it will still be seen as plagiarism.

Here are some oth­er things you could get penalised for:

• Scraped con­tent
• Sneaky redi­rects
• Auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed content
• Link schemes
• Key­word stuffing
• Fill­ing your site with mali­cious virus­es or oth­er malware

To see if you’ve received a man­u­al penal­ty, you can check in Google Search Con­sole. How­ev­er, Search Con­sole won’t be able to tell you if your web­site is suf­fer­ing due to an algo­rith­mic penalty.

Why is my business not showing up on Google Maps?

The first and most obvi­ous expla­na­tion is that you haven’t reg­is­tered with Google My Busi­ness (GMB). But if you’ve already done that, it could be due to one of the fol­low­ing reasons:

1. Google My Business hasn’t verified you yet This is a simple one.

New GMB list­ings won’t go live straight away – they’ll need to be ver­i­fied first. To check if yours has been ver­i­fied, just search your busi­ness’s name and your city into Google, and your com­pa­ny should appear on the right-hand side. If there’s a link that says, “Own this busi­ness?” then your list­ing has not been ver­i­fied yet. You might be won­der­ing if this mat­ters since your list­ing is still there. Well, if your busi­ness is unver­i­fied, it’s unlike­ly to appear in Maps if there’s a lot of com­pe­ti­tion. Plus, it’s not actu­al­ly eli­gi­ble to appear in Maps if it has­n’t been ver­i­fied. The ver­i­fi­ca­tion process means you’re more like­ly to appear in Maps results even if there’s a lot of com­pe­ti­tion in your local area. You can learn more about the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process here.

2. No location authority

You might have ini­tial­ly thought, “great! My Google My Busi­ness list­ing has been ver­i­fied!” Then, lat­er down the line, you realise that’s not enough to be top rank­ing in Google Maps. In com­pet­i­tive spaces, such as large or dense cities, there are a lot of local busi­ness­es on Maps which can mean many new GMB list­ings don’t appear in search results. Loca­tion author­i­ty, not ver­i­fi­ca­tion, is the key to rank­ing well in Google Maps. Fur­ther­more, it can increase the radius in which peo­ple find your busi­ness via Google. List­ings with low loca­tion author­i­ty might only be found by peo­ple with­in a small radius. So, what can you do to increase loca­tion authority?

3. Your listing has been suspended

If GMB has told you that your list­ing has been sus­pend­ed, it could be for one of these reasons:

• You’ve changed or updat­ed some details about your list­ing, and Google is wait­ing for verification
• Your GMB list­ing title has been key­word-stuffed Google is in doubt about the valid­i­ty of your premis­es (they might ask for pho­to­graph­ic evidence)
• Your “premis­es” is actu­al­ly a P.O. Box or sim­i­lar vir­tu­al location
• The URL ref­er­ence in GMB is actu­al­ly a for­ward­ing URL
• Although your busi­ness does­n’t have a phys­i­cal loca­tion, you haven’t hid­den your street address from Maps

If you think one of these issues is the rea­son for your sus­pen­sion, just call Google Local help, and they will be able to trou­bleshoot the issue and pro­vide fur­ther help. To access this ser­vice, first call Google Adwords sup­port and select the GMB option.

4. You relocated

If a busi­ness relo­cates its premis­es, it’s not uncom­mon for them to dis­ap­pear from Google Maps.

This issue is like­ly to arise if you’re not active­ly man­ag­ing your GMB list­ing. The thing is, for a GMB list­ing to relo­cate, it needs to have a pre­vi­ous address to begin with. If it does­n’t, and Google dis­cov­ers you’ve got a new address, your list­ing can be sus­pend­ed, which results in a removal from Google Maps results.

On the oth­er hand, if you active­ly man­age your GMB list­ing, it should work with you and change your address with­out hic­cups. In this instance, the most Google will ask is for you to rever­i­fy your new premis­es’ address.

Final thoughts

There are hun­dreds of ways you could opti­mise your web­site, but none will be worth it if you’ve got tech­ni­cal or prac­ti­cal block­ages in your way. Before you even begin a cost­ly SEO strat­e­gy, you must fig­ure out what block­ages are pre­vent­ing your site from appear­ing on Google so you can start from the best posi­tion pos­si­ble. Whether it’s slow site load­ing speed, a sneaky “noin­dex” meta tag, or your web­site’s being held in Google’s Sand­box, you’ve got to know what you’re deal­ing with. With­out know­ing, it’d be like run­ning a race with­out know­ing that your shoelaces are tied togeth­er. If you’re already inves­ti­gat­ing your web­site’s sit­u­a­tion, you’re on the right track. Just keep an eye out for the issues list­ed above, and you’ll be on your way to a healthy search engine ranking!