Why doesn't my website show up on Google?

Before you argue with anyone: search Google for site:yourdomain.com — like that, no space, with your domain — and see how many results come back. That one search splits the two possible worlds, and you can run it right now.

• Your pages come back. Then Google does have you. Your problem isn't that you don't appear: it's that you don't appear high, which is a different thing with a different fix. Skip to cause 4.
• Nothing comes back, or far less than you have. Google hasn't indexed you. Causes 1, 2 and 3 are the candidates, and two of them take fifteen minutes to fix.

Cause 1 · Your site is new and hasn't had time

The most common one, and the least welcome. A freshly published site takes days to a few weeks to appear at all, and months to sit well for competitive searches. No trick buys that time.

What you can do is stop waiting to be found: register the site in Google Search Console, which is free, and submit the sitemap. You'll also see, with data rather than guesswork, which pages Google has and which it doesn't. If someone built your site and you don't have access to that tool, ask for it: it's yours.

Cause 2 · The site is telling Google to stay out

This happens more than it should, and almost always the same way: the site was built in a staging environment with indexing deliberately blocked, and nobody removed the block when it went live.

Two things to check, both of which you can look at yourself:

1. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: /, there it is: you're telling search engines not to crawl anything.
2. Look at a page's source. Right-click, "view page source", and search for noindex. If it turns up in a robots tag, that page is explicitly asking not to be listed.

Either one is a one-minute fix for whoever has access. It's also the cause that stings most to find late, because it's months of not existing over one line that shouldn't have shipped.

Cause 3 · Google can't read what you're showing

If your site paints all its content with JavaScript, or if your main content is images — the restaurant menu as a photo, the services as a PDF — Google may be seeing an empty page where you see a full one.

The kitchen-table test: open your page, select the text with the mouse and try to copy it. If you can't select it, it isn't text. And what isn't text doesn't rank. It's exactly the PDF menu problem, and it applies to any catalogue.

Cause 4 · You do appear, behind everyone else

This is the most frequent case of all, and the most misread. You're on Google, at position 40. Nobody reaches position 40, so in practice you don't exist — but the problem isn't technical, it's competitive.

Three reasons, in order of weight:

• Your page doesn't talk about what people search for. Your home page says "Welcome to our company, leaders in integrated solutions" and people type "24 hour locksmith Bucaramanga". There's no way for Google to match those two phrases, because they don't share a single useful word.
• You don't have a page per thing you sell. One page trying to rank for five services loses to five dedicated pages. It's the difference between a brochure and a site.
• Nobody links to you. Google uses links from other sites as a signal that you're real. A site nobody points at competes at a disadvantage, and writing more doesn't fix that.

Cause 5 · You're being penalised for something done on your behalf

The least common and the most expensive. If at some point somebody "ranked" you by buying hundreds of links, stuffing pages with repeated keywords or copying text from another site, you may be penalised.

Search Console tells you plainly, under manual actions. If there's nothing there, you're not penalised and you can rule this out — plenty of people assume otherwise and spend months chasing a ghost.

The order I'd check it in

1. site:yourdomain.com, to find out which of the two worlds you're in.
2. robots.txt and noindex. Fifteen minutes, free, rules out the worst.
3. Search Console: coverage, manual actions, and which queries already bring you people.
4. Read your own home page out loud and ask yourself whether anyone would type that into Google.

The first three cost nothing and resolve most cases. If you got to the fourth and that's where the problem is, then it is work: rewriting for what people search, and giving each service its own page.

Be wary of anyone who diagnoses this without opening your Search Console. Without that data, any explanation of why you don't appear is a well-dressed guess.

If you want me to look at it

That's an SEO audit: what's holding you back today and the list of fixes in order of impact, for anyone to carry out — me or your current provider. What that work costs in the Colombian market, with ranges and what it should include, is in how much does SEO cost in Colombia.

And if it turns out the problem isn't the ranking but the site — slow, uneditable, broken on a phone — that's a different conversation: how much does a website cost in Colombia has the ranges, and web design has what I do for that price.

One last case, and I include it because I run into it often: sometimes the right answer isn't touching the site but fixing the business listing. If your customer finds you by proximity, that's played on the map and not on your website — how to show up on Google Maps walks through it.