Not on Google? A step-by-step check

The sentence "I have a website, but nobody finds me on Google" usually hides one of three different problems. Each has its own cause and its own fix, and if you mix them up you end up rebuilding the whole site when the real issue was a forgotten checkbox.

Below is the order I check them in. It runs from the most trivial cause to the slowest one to fix. Do not move to the next step until you have closed the one before it.

First: what are you actually searching for?

Open a private window in your browser (results in your own account are personalised and can fool you) and run two searches:

Your exact business name.
What you do, plus the town. For example "plumber Târgoviște" or "dental clinic Pitești".

If you show up for the first search and not the second, Google knows you, it just does not see you as the best answer to a general search. That is layer three. If you do not show up even for your own name, the problem is lower down and you start at layer one.

Layer one: does Google know the site exists?

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, with your own domain. The result shows which pages Google has in its index. If nothing comes up, there is no point thinking about keywords yet: the search engine has not even opened the door.

Then open Google Search Console. It is free and only asks you to prove the domain is yours. In it you will find:

the page indexing report, which tells you which pages are indexed and, more usefully, why the others are not;
URL inspection, where you paste an address and see exactly what Google thinks of it;
the place to submit your sitemap.xml, the list of pages you want it to find.

The causes you meet most often at this layer are mundane and take minutes to fix:

a noindex tag left over from when the site was being built (in WordPress it is a single checkbox, under reading settings, asking search engines not to index the site);
a robots.txt file that blocks everything;
a changed domain with no redirects from the old addresses to the new ones;
a site launched so recently that Google simply has not visited it yet.

Layer two: can Google read what is on the page?

Once you are in the index, the question becomes whether the page says clearly what you do and where. Google reads text, not intentions. A few things to check on every important page:

The page title (the one in the browser tab and in results) names the service and the town, not just "Home".
Every important service has its own page. A single "Services" page with ten short paragraphs competes weakly for all ten.
The text is real text, not lettering baked into images or banners.
On a phone, the page loads quickly and reads without zooming. PageSpeed Insights, also free from Google, shows you what slows the page down.

You do not need to fix everything at once. Start with the page that should bring you the most customers.

Layer three: does Google have a reason to show you locally?

For searches like "what you do + town", Google leans heavily on your business profile (Google Business Profile), the panel that appears beside the results and on Maps. Plenty of owners do not even know they have one, because it was created automatically and nobody ever claimed it.

What you can do today, nothing technical involved:

Find your business on Google Maps and claim the profile. It is free.
Fill in every field: the right category, address, opening hours, phone, website.
Add real photos of your premises, your work or your products, not stock images.
Ask happy customers for reviews by sending them the direct link. Reply to all of them, critical ones included, calmly and specifically.
Check that your name, address and phone number are written identically on the site and on the profile.
Post an update or a recent job now and then, so the profile looks lived in.

The profile and the site prop each other up. The profile gives you local visibility quickly; the site gives Google something consistent to read when someone wants detail.

What does not help

Someone promising you the first page within a week. Nobody controls Google's rankings.
Your town's name repeated thirty times in the footer.
Rebuilding the site from scratch before checking layer one. I have seen enough forgotten checkboxes to know it is worth five minutes.

How long it takes

If the problem was indexing, Google usually comes back within days or weeks of the fix. Local positions move more slowly, over months, and depend on how active the profile is and how clear the site is. It is upkeep, not a button.

If you have been through all three layers and still cannot see where the blockage is, send me your site address and the search you want to appear for via the contact form. I will tell you which layer the problem sits in. If you would rather I handle all of it, the details are under SEO.