Your website is not showing up on Google. Here are the reasons, in the order to check them.

You typed your own trade and your own city into Google, and you were not there.

That is either a real problem or no problem at all, and you cannot tell which from the outside. So work through the list below in order. It is arranged by what is cheapest to rule out and what goes wrong most often, not by what sounds most serious. Most of the time the answer is in the first three.

How long has the site been live?

If the site is new, there may be nothing wrong with it.

Google has to find the site, read it, decide it is worth keeping, and then decide where it belongs against businesses that have been ranking in your city for years. None of that happens on launch day. A new site with no history is not being penalized. It is being ignored until it gives Google a reason not to.

This is the cheapest thing on the list to check and the most expensive one to get wrong. Owners rip out a site that was on its way to working, or fire the person who built it, before the thing has had a chance to do anything at all.

If the site has been live long enough that the wait is no longer a reasonable answer, keep going.

Are you searching for your own business name?

If you search your business name and see yourself at the top, you have learned almost nothing.

Nobody searches your business name except people who already know you. Existing customers, referrals, someone holding your card. Those people were going to find you anyway. The searches that bring you work are the ones where a stranger types the job and the place, because his water heater is leaking and he has no idea who you are.

Two businesses can look identical in a Google search and be in completely different situations. One ranks for its own name and nothing else. The other ranks for the work. From the owner's chair they look the same, because the owner searches his own name.

There is a second trap in the same place. Google knows who you are and where you are standing. Your own results are shaped by your location, your history, and whatever account you are signed into. Your site can look higher to you than it does to anyone else in your service area.

Is the site missing from Google, or is it just buried?

These are two entirely different problems and they get confused constantly.

Not indexed means Google does not have your pages at all. You are not ranking badly. You are not ranking. Nothing you write, no photo you add and no review you collect can move a page Google has never stored.

Ranking badly means Google has your pages, has read them, and has decided other businesses answer the question better. That is a competitive problem, not a technical one.

You can tell which one you have. Type site: followed by your domain into Google, with no space after the colon. If nothing comes back, the site is not in the index. If your pages come back, you are indexed and you are losing on merit.

The fixes for those two situations have almost nothing in common. Months get wasted on the wrong one.

Why does everyone else show up in the map results?

The businesses sitting in the map results at the top of a "near me" search are not there because of their websites.

That block of results is decided by the Google Business Profile, which is a separate thing from your site. Separate listing, separate rules, separate place to manage it. A great website does not put you in there, and a profile that is unclaimed, half filled in, missing its service area, or filed under the wrong category keeps you out of it no matter how good the website is.

This is why an owner can be right that he is invisible and wrong about where the problem lives. He is looking at his site. The searches he is losing were never decided by his site.

Both surfaces matter and they feed each other, but they are fixed in different places by different work.

The report says position one. Why is the phone not ringing?

Because a ranking report can be measuring itself.

We watch what actually happens on trade sites, and this pattern shows up. One phrase gets searched over and over on a fixed schedule. Always desktop, never a phone. Never a click after the search. Month after month, in the same shape.

That is not a customer. That is rank checking software, and it is frequently the software producing the report the owner is being shown. The tool searches the phrase, finds the site, records position one, and reports position one. Nobody was ever there.

Real searches for a local trade come mostly from phones. A ranking that only exists in desktop checks, and never turns into a click or a call, is a number about the tool rather than a number about your business.

If you are being shown a number one ranking and your phone is quiet, you may have just found your answer. Ask what a report is counting before you accept what it concludes.

Do the pages still work?

A page has to load before it can rank.

Sites get rebuilt. Pages get renamed, merged, deleted, moved to a new address without anything left behind pointing at where they went. The homepage keeps working, so nobody notices, while the service pages and the city pages that were doing the actual earning now return errors.

Google drops what it cannot load. It does not warn you first, and it does not ask.

The version you see is not always the version Google gets, either. A page can load perfectly in your browser and fail for a crawler, especially on a site where content is assembled after the page arrives. That gap is invisible from the outside, which is why it survives so long.

Is the site telling Google to stay out?

This is the least common cause and the most complete one.

A site under construction is normally built with an instruction on it telling search engines to keep away, so nobody finds a half finished site before launch. Then it goes live and the instruction is still there. The site looks finished. It is perfect. It is also invisible, and it will stay invisible until somebody removes the block.

The same thing happens long after launch. A rebuild, a migration, a settings change, and the site goes quiet with no other symptom. Nothing looks broken. There is nothing to see on the page.

If you have gone through everything above and the site is not new, not indexed, and not broken, this is where to look.

So whose fault is it, and what now?

It depends on which of the above it turned out to be, and that is the honest answer.

If the site is new, nobody is at fault and the work is to keep going. If you have been checking your own business name, the problem was the measurement rather than the site. If you are in the map results and nowhere else, or in search and not in the map results, two different jobs need doing. If your ranking report shows number one and your phone is silent, ask hard questions about who has been measuring what.

What none of these are is a Saturday afternoon. Getting a site indexed, sorting out a Business Profile so it holds its position, rebuilding the pages that answer the searches you actually want, and putting measurement in place that counts calls rather than positions, that is real work and it is ongoing. Some of it is a contractor website design problem and some of it is not, which is exactly why it is worth finding out which before anybody spends money.

If you want a straight read on which of these is happening to you, tell us what you are seeing. We will tell you what we find, including the version where nothing is wrong and the answer is to wait.