It is one of the most common things we hear from business owners in Northern Ireland: "I paid for a website and nobody can find it." The good news is that the cause is nearly always one of a small number of problems, and you can check most of them yourself in ten minutes.
1. Is Google allowed to see it?
Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk (with your own address). If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed your site at all. The usual culprits are a "discourage search engines" setting left switched on after the site was built, or a robots.txt file blocking everything. Both take seconds to fix once you know they are there.
2. Does Google know the site exists?
A brand new site with no links pointing to it can sit undiscovered for weeks. Set up Google Search Console, verify your domain and submit your sitemap. It is free, and it is also the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site.
3. Do your page titles say what you do and where?
The page title is the blue link people see in the results. "Home" tells Google nothing. "Emergency Plumber in Belfast | Your Business Name" tells it everything. Check every important page.
4. Is the site fast and usable on a phone?
Most local searches happen on a mobile. Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is poor, that is hurting both your rankings and the number of visitors who stay long enough to ring you.
5. Did you move or rebuild the site recently?
If rankings vanished after a redesign, the old page addresses were probably not redirected to the new ones. Google treats the new pages as strangers and the old ones as dead. We covered how to avoid this in moving a website without losing your rankings.
6. Have you claimed your Google Business Profile?
For "near me" searches, the map results usually appear above the normal ones, and they come from Google Business Profile rather than your website. If you have not claimed yours, start with our Belfast business checklist.
7. Are you being patient enough?
SEO is slow. Even when everything is right, it typically takes months rather than weeks. We looked at real timelines in how long does SEO take.
Still stuck?
If you have checked all seven and you are still invisible, the problem is usually competition: other sites are simply doing these things better. That is where a proper audit helps. That is what our SEO service starts with.