Your business is online but nobody’s finding it: where to look first

A website that exists and a website that gets found are different projects. If yours is
live but the phone isn’t ringing, there’s an order worth working through before you spend
anything.

1. Check you’re actually in the index

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com.au. That shows roughly what Google has
stored. If pages are missing — or if the whole site is — nothing else you do matters yet.
The usual causes are a leftover “discourage search engines” setting from when the site was
being built, or a robots file blocking crawlers that was never switched off at launch.

2. Read your own page titles

The title is the blue line in search results and it’s the single biggest on-page signal
of what a page is about. A surprising number of small business sites still have “Home”,
“Untitled”, or the theme’s default sitting there. Every page should say plainly what it is
and where you are.

3. Search for yourself the way a customer would

Not your business name — you’ll rank for that regardless. Search the thing someone would
type if they didn’t know you existed. That’s the honest test, and it usually explains the
gap between “we’re online” and “we get enquiries”.

4. Check the site on a phone, on mobile data

Not on the office wifi. Most local searching happens on a phone, often on a patchy
connection, and a site that takes eight seconds to load has lost most of those visitors
before they saw anything. While you’re there, check the phone number is tappable and the
enquiry form actually submits — broken forms are far more common than anyone expects,
because nobody tests their own form after launch.

5. Make sure your details agree with each other

Your business name, address and phone number should be identical on your website, your
Google Business Profile, and anywhere else you’re listed. Not similar — identical. When
they disagree, you’re asking search engines to guess which version is right.

Then, and only then, spend money

Most of the above costs nothing but an afternoon, and doing it first means anything you
spend afterwards lands on solid ground rather than propping up a site that can’t convert.
When you do reach the point where the constraint is genuinely competition rather than
your own setup, SEO Excellence does this properly and can tell you honestly whether a term is winnable
before you commit to chasing it.

If what’s actually slowing you down is the technology behind the business rather than the
marketing in front of it, that’s our end — Geeks I.T. Melbourne, IT support on
03 7057 2770.