Your website exists. Why can’t Google find it?

It is the call we get most often after “how much does it cost”. The website exists. It is online. You type your name into Google… and nothing. Or an old directory listing, a dead Facebook page, the competitor from the next town over. It is not bad luck. It is almost always one of the six things below.

Google does not know your website exists yet

A new site does not appear the day it goes live. Google first has to discover it, read it, then decide to show it. That can take days; sometimes weeks when nobody has 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 the site map submitted (the sitemap file). From then on, Google knows what to read and you see, page by page, what it understood. If your agency did not do it at delivery, ask for it. It is the bare minimum.

You search for your name, but your customers search for their problem

You type “Excavation Tremblay” and you find yourself. Great, but nobody searches for “Excavation Tremblay” 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, spelled out, 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 there in black and white? Not in an image, not in a slogan: as text, in a heading. If the answer is no, that is where it starts.

Your Google Business Profile is not connected to the site

When someone searches for a trade and a town, it is not a list of websites that shows up first: it is a map with three listings. Those listings come from Google Business, not from your website. If yours does not exist, has not been claimed, or points to an old web address, you are not on the map. And on a phone, the map takes up the whole screen.

Claim the profile, add the right number, the right hours, the right category, photos, and the link to your site. Then make sure your name, address and phone number are written exactly the same way on the site, on the profile and on Facebook. Google compares. When it all matches, it trusts you.

The site is slow on a cell phone

Google looks at the mobile version of your site first, because that is the one most people use. A site built on a heavy template (twenty plugins, six-megabyte images, animations everywhere) takes several seconds to show on an ordinary connection. Google measures it and takes it into account.

Test it yourself: open your site on your phone, on mobile data, not on wifi. If you have time to look elsewhere before it shows, so do your customers. And 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 be able to answer, in its title, the question: “What do I do, and where?” If you offer several services in several towns, each one deserves its own page, with its own title. That is exactly why our bigger packages have more pages (see the Expansion website, one page per service and per town).

Nobody talks about you anywhere else

Google trusts a website more when other websites talk about it. No need for a newspaper article: a listing in your association’s directory, a mention on the town’s website, a supplier that lists you as a certified installer, a happy customer who mentions you. Each of those links tells Google you are a real business, rooted somewhere.

It is slow to build, and that is exactly why it is worth something: the competitor who bought a template yesterday does not have it.

Where to start

• Today: Search Console, sitemap submitted, Google Business Profile claimed and connected to the site.
• This week: your trade and your towns spelled out in the page headings.
• This month: the site tested on a phone, on mobile data, and lightened if it drags.
• Ongoing: one mention, one link, one directory listing at a time.

None of this is magic, and none of us can guarantee you a ranking. What we can guarantee is that a website where these six things are fixed starts well ahead of most of the sites we see.

That is what “built for Google” means in our packages: headings that state your trade and your town, the sitemap submitted, the Google profile connected, and a site that loads fast on a phone. Not magic: method.