First, tell indexing apart from ranking
Search Google for your domain in the form site:yourdomain.co.uk. If pages come back, Google has indexed the site, and this is a ranking problem, not a visibility one. If nothing comes back, Google does not have the site at all, and everything below applies.
Then search your exact business name. A site that is indexed but does not appear for its own name usually has a name that clashes with a bigger brand, or a homepage that never states the business name in text.
The six causes
- It is too new. A site published in the last few weeks with no links pointing at it may simply not have been crawled yet. Submitting a sitemap in Search Console is the fix, and then patience.
- It is blocked. A robots.txt rule, a noindex meta tag or an HTTP header left over from the staging site, or a password or firewall that turns Google away.
- Nothing links to it. Google finds most sites by following links. A brand new domain with no directory listing, no Google Business Profile, no social profile and no supplier page can sit uncrawled for a long time.
- The pages duplicate each other. Several near-identical town or service pages, or the same page reachable at several addresses, can leave Google indexing one and ignoring the rest.
- It was penalised or hacked. Rare, but a manual action shows in Search Console, and a hacked site can be removed for serving spam or malware.
- It ranks, but below where you looked. Most owners check the first page for a competitive phrase. The site may be on page four for that phrase and first for others.
The ten-minute test
- Run the site: search above.
- Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser and look for Disallow: /.
- View the page source of the homepage and search it for noindex.
- Check the site loads over https and that both the www and non-www addresses reach the same page.
- Sign in to Google Search Console, or set it up, and use URL Inspection on the homepage. It tells you directly whether the page is indexed and, if not, why.
- Check the Pages report in Search Console for excluded pages and the reason given for each.
What actually fixes it
If the site is blocked, removing the rule or tag and requesting indexing usually brings it back within days. If it is new and unlinked, a verified Search Console property with a submitted sitemap, a Google Business Profile, and a handful of genuine listings and mentions gets it crawled. If pages duplicate each other, the fix is fewer, better pages with clear canonical addresses rather than more.
If the site is indexed and simply ranking badly, no amount of resubmitting will help. That is a content, links and local-signals problem, and it is the work described on the SEO and local SEO pages linked below.
We can diagnose it in one working day
Send your web address through the form below. We check the crawl rules, the tags, the server headers, the canonical setup, the Search Console picture where you can give us access, and what the site currently ranks for. Within one working day you get a plain-English answer on which of the six causes applies, what it will take to fix, and a fixed quote if you want us to do it. If it turns out to be a ranking problem rather than an indexing one, we will say so rather than sell you an indexing fix.