Most guides for this search assume the problem is search optimisation and end by selling some. In our experience the cause is more often a domain that lapsed, a checkbox left ticked after the build, or a redesign that changed every address without telling Google where the old ones went. Ten minutes, in order, and you will know which.
The whole triage rests on one distinction. A site that is not indexed has been excluded from Google entirely, and the causes are few, mechanical and mostly free to fix. A site that is indexed but not ranking is in Google and simply not near the top. Those are different problems with different timelines, and the first minute tells you which one you have.
- One search settles the first question: site:yourdomain.com. Nothing back means not indexed; pages back means indexed but not ranking. Different problems, different timelines.
- Not indexed has six causes, in order: expired domain or hosting, a blocking rule left from the build, a site too new, a redesign without redirects, a hack, or a manual action.
- Five of the six are checkable in a minute and free to fix. The redesign without redirects is the one that needs a developer and the one to ask about before any rebuild.
- Indexed but invisible for what you sell is usually a homepage that does not say what you do, pages competing with each other, or thin pages. Expect sixty to ninety days for movement.
- A monthly retainer to un-tick a checkbox is monitoring, not SEO. Technical fixes on an existing site are a one-off job.
Minute one: indexed or not
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com, with your actual domain and nothing else. Then search your business name.
- Pages come back for both. The site is indexed. Skip to the ranking section.
- Pages come back for the site search but not for your name. Indexed, but the site does not say clearly enough who you are. Ranking section, with the homepage as the first fix.
- Nothing comes back for the site search. Not indexed. Work through the six causes below in order.
Not indexed: six causes, in order
Ordered by how often we find them on small business sites, and by how quickly each can be checked.
- The domain or hosting has expired. Open the site in a private window. A registrar parking page, a hosting notice, or nothing at all means the site is not live, and Google drops sites that stop answering. Check the renewal dates at your registrar and host before doing anything else. This is the cause nobody writes about, because there is nothing to sell. An expired security certificate is a cousin of this one. It does not remove you from Google, but it turns visitors away with a warning, and it needs renewing today.
- A blocking rule left over from the build. Three places. The robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt, where a line reading
Disallow: /tells every crawler to stay out. A noindex tag in the page code, often added by a plugin. And in WordPress, the setting labelled "discourage search engines from indexing this site", which developers tick on a staging site and forget to untick at launch. We see this on sites that have been live for months. Technical SEO in plain words covers how to check each without buying a tool. - The site is new. Google has not found it yet. Set up Google Search Console, submit the sitemap, and use the inspection tool to request indexing of the homepage. Days to a few weeks is normal. Before then, silence is not a fault.
- A redesign changed the addresses. The old site had a page at /services.html and the new one has it at /services/. Without a redirect from each old address to its new one, every link and ranking the old pages earned now points at a page that no longer exists. Google reads that as the site having gone. Ask whoever built the new site for the redirect map. If the answer is a blank look, that is the cause. It is the single most expensive mistake in a rebuild, and how long a website takes explains why migrations deserve their own timeline.
- The site has been hacked. Search Console shows a security issues report, and results sometimes carry the warning "this site may be hacked". A compromised site is removed or demoted until it is cleaned. Your host can usually confirm, and cleaning is a job for the host or a developer today rather than a marketing question.
- A manual action. Rare on small business sites, and Search Console says so plainly under manual actions. It usually means the site, or a previous owner of the domain, did something Google's guidelines prohibit. The report names the problem, and the fix is to remove it and request a review.
Five of the six are checkable in a minute each and fixable without an agency. The fourth is the one that needs a developer, and it is the one to ask about before signing off any redesign.
Indexed, but not showing up for what you sell
If pages came back in minute one, the site is in Google and this is the other problem. It is slower to fix, and it has a smaller set of causes than the industry suggests.
The homepage does not say what you do. Read it as a stranger: if the first screen does not name the service and the place, Google cannot rank it for either. Two or three pages compete for the same search, so none of them wins. The pages are thin, a paragraph where a buyer's question needed a page. Or the search you are checking is a local one, in which case the result you want is the map pack, and that is decided by your Google Business Profile rather than your website. Google Business Profile not showing up is the diagnostic for that case.
The honest timeline for ranking work is sixty to ninety days for movement and compounding after that. Anyone promising the first page in a fortnight is selling you something else. The work itself is the technical fixes above, then pages that answer the questions buyers actually type.
The six-cause order, the minute-one test and the sixty-to-ninety-day ranking expectation are our editorial position from auditing small business sites before rebuilds, not survey data. The behaviour of robots.txt, noindex tags, the WordPress search visibility setting, Search Console's inspection, security and manual actions reports, and Google's handling of expired sites is described from Google's own documentation and our experience. The $4,900 build with its $500 technical SEO line and the $1,350 monthly SEO rate are our published prices, listed on the pricing page. No third-party statistics are cited.
What it costs to fix
Most of the six causes cost nothing but an hour. Where a site was built without redirects, without a sitemap, or with a blocking rule nobody removed, the fix is a one-off technical job rather than a subscription. Anyone selling you a monthly retainer to un-tick a checkbox is selling monitoring.
On a new build with us, the technical SEO foundation is a $500 line inside the $4,900 total for a custom site of up to eight pages. It covers schema, speed, sitemaps, redirects and llms.txt from day one. More pages, a catalogue, or a large migration with years of addresses to redirect move that number, and they are itemised on the pricing page before anything is signed. Ongoing SEO on an existing site starts at $1,350 a month, and most of that money goes to content rather than to plumbing, because once the site is reachable the plumbing is done.