Why can’t I find my website on Google?

It’s the call we get most often after “how much does it cost”. The site exists. It’s online. You type your name into Google… and nothing. Or an old directory profile, a dead Facebook page, the competitor from the next town over. It isn’t bad luck. It’s almost always one of these six.

Google doesn’t know your site exists yet

A new site doesn’t show up the day it goes live. Google has to discover it, read it, then decide to show it. That takes days — sometimes weeks when nobody told it where to look.

The fix is free and takes an hour: a Google Search Console account, proof that the domain is yours, and submitting the site map. From there Google knows what to read, and you can see, page by page, what it understood. If your agency didn’t do this at delivery, ask for it. It’s the minimum.

You search your name, but your customers search their problem

You type “Tremblay Excavation” and you find yourself. Good — but nobody searches “Tremblay Excavation” except people who already know you. The customer you want types “excavation Saint-Rémi” or “French drain Candiac”. If those words appear nowhere on your site, in plain text, Google has no reason to show you for that search.

Look at your home page with fresh eyes: are your trade and the towns you serve written out, in text, in a heading? Not in an image, not in a slogan. If not, that’s where it starts.

Your Google Business listing isn’t tied to the site

When someone searches a trade and a town, the first thing that appears isn’t a list of websites: it’s a map with three listings. Those come from Google Business, not from your site. If yours doesn’t exist, isn’t claimed, or points to an old web address, you’re not on the map — and on a phone, the map takes the whole screen.

Claim the listing, put in the right number, hours, category, photos, and the link to your site. Then make sure the name, address and phone are written exactly the same on the site, the listing and Facebook. Google compares. When they match, it trusts you.

The site is slow on a phone

Google looks at the mobile version of your site first, because that’s what most people use. A site built on a heavy template — twenty plugins, six-megabyte images, animations everywhere — takes seconds to show up on an ordinary connection. Google measures that, and it counts.

Test it yourself: open your site on your phone, on cellular data, not wifi. If you have time to look away before it appears, so do your customers. So does Google.

The site says “welcome” instead of saying what you do

“Welcome to our website! We are a dynamic company at your service since 1998.” Google reads that and learns nothing: not the trade, not the town, not the service. A heading that says “Commercial and residential snow removal in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu” says more in one line than three paragraphs of welcome.

Every page should answer, in its heading, “What do I do, and where?” If you offer several services in several towns, each deserves its own page with its own heading. That’s exactly why our bigger packages have more pages.

Nobody mentions you anywhere else

Google trusts a site more when other sites talk about it. You don’t need a newspaper article: a listing in your association’s directory, a mention on the municipality’s site, a supplier that lists you as a certified installer, a happy customer who links to you. Each one tells Google you’re a real business, rooted somewhere.

It’s slow to build, and that’s exactly why it’s worth something: the competitor who bought a template yesterday doesn’t have it.

Where to start

• Today: Search Console, site map submitted, Google Business listing claimed and tied to the site.
• This week: your trade and towns written out in the page headings.
• This month: the site tested on a phone over cellular, and lightened if it drags.
• Ongoing: one mention, one link, one directory listing at a time.

None of this is magic, and nobody can guarantee you a position. What we can guarantee is that a site with these six things handled starts well ahead of most of the sites we see.

That’s what “structured for Google” means in our packages: headings that say the trade and the town, the site map submitted, the Google listing tied in, and a site that loads fast on a phone. Not magic — method.