You’ve typed your own business name into Google, or the service you offer plus your town, and… nothing. Or something, but it’s a competitor, a directory listing, or your Facebook page — not your actual website. It’s an unsettling thing to discover, and it’s more common than most business owners realise. Here’s how to work through the real reasons, roughly in the order worth checking.
First: are you searching the right thing?
Before anything else — search your exact domain (site:yourdomain.co.nz in Google) rather than your business name. Business names get outranked by directories, reviews sites, and Facebook pages all the time even when the website itself is indexed and working fine. That’s a ranking problem, not a “Google doesn’t know I exist” problem, and the fix is different. If site:yourdomain.co.nz returns your pages, skip to the ranking section further down.
Reason 1: the site is genuinely new
If your site launched in the last few weeks, this is very likely the whole answer. Google doesn’t index a new site instantly — it has to discover it, crawl it, and decide how much to trust it, which typically takes several weeks and sometimes longer for a brand-new domain with no history. This isn’t a fault in the build; it’s just how long it takes. We’ve written more about this timeline in what happens after your website goes live.
Reason 2: Google hasn’t found it yet
Google mostly finds pages by following links, or by reading a sitemap you’ve submitted directly. If your site isn’t linked from anywhere else on the web and nobody’s submitted a sitemap in Google Search Console, Google may simply not know your pages exist yet. This is a five-minute fix: submit your sitemap in Search Console, and check the “Pages” report there to see exactly which of your pages are indexed and which aren’t.
Reason 3: something is actively telling Google not to index it
This one’s more common than it should be, especially after a redesign or a migration to a new host. A single line of code — a noindex tag, or a robots.txt file blocking crawlers — is enough to keep an entire site invisible, even though it loads perfectly for a human visitor. It’s worth checking directly rather than assuming it’s fine: Search Console’s URL Inspection tool will tell you plainly whether a page is indexed, and if not, why not.
Reason 4: the site is indexed, but ranks too low to notice
If site:yourdomain.co.nz shows your pages, Google knows they exist — you’re not invisible, you’re just not winning the specific search you tried. This is the most common actual situation, and it’s a different problem to the ones above. It usually comes down to:
- Competition — a generic search like “plumber” in a city with fifty plumbers is genuinely hard to rank for; “plumber Motueka” is a much smaller field
- Content that doesn’t match the search — if your homepage never actually says the words someone’s searching, Google has less reason to connect the two
- A thin or generic Google Business Profile — for local searches, this often outweighs your actual website; an unclaimed or half-filled-out profile is a common, overlooked cause
Reason 5: you’re checking the wrong kind of result
A lot of local searches show a “map pack” (three business listings with a map) above the regular organic results. If you’re looking for your website in a screen dominated by the map pack, you might be scanning the wrong section entirely — your site could be ranking reasonably in the organic results just below it. Worth a proper scroll before assuming the worst.
The order worth checking things in
- Search
site:yourdomain.co.nz— confirms whether you’re indexed at all - Check Search Console’s coverage report and URL Inspection tool — confirms whether anything is actively blocking indexing
- Check your Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and matches your site — the biggest lever for local search specifically
- Only then worry about content and competition — this is a real factor, but it’s the slowest to fix and the last thing worth troubleshooting
When it’s worth getting help
If you’ve worked through the list above and you’re still not appearing for searches that genuinely matter to your business, that’s worth a proper look rather than more guessing — sometimes it’s one specific technical issue (a redirect loop, a duplicate version of the site at www and non-www, a noindex tag nobody remembers adding) that a quick audit turns up immediately. Our free SEO check will tell you plainly whether any of the technical causes above are the culprit.
The honest answer
Most of the time, “not showing up on Google” turns out to be one of two things: the site is simply too new for Google to have caught up yet, or it’s indexed fine and the real issue is ranking for a specific, competitive search. Both are fixable — but they’re fixed differently, so it’s worth confirming which one you’re actually dealing with before you start changing things.