Checkatrade Alternatives: Where Else Trades Get Work
- Website Strategy
If your website is not showing up on Google, it is one of two problems, and they are not the same one. Either Google does not have your site at all, or Google has it and is choosing not to show it for the terms you care about. The first is usually a switch left in the wrong position and takes minutes to fix. The second takes longer, but it is not a mystery either. This guide separates the two, then works through the twelve causes we find most often on UK business sites, in the order we actually check them.
Do this before anything else, because the two problems have completely different fixes and confusing them wastes hours.
Go to Google and search for site:yourdomain.co.uk, swapping in your real domain.
That single search tells you which half of this guide to read. It is the first thing we run on any site a client asks us about, and it settles the question in less time than it takes to open Search Console.
Four situations account for nearly everything we see. Find yours and go straight to it.
“I have just launched and it has never appeared.” Most likely reasons 1 to 4. Start with the noindex switch, because on a new WordPress site that is the answer more often than everything else combined.
“I can find my homepage but not my service pages.” You are indexed but not ranking. Reasons 6 to 8 are yours.
“It shows up when I search my business name, but never for what I actually do.” Also indexed, also not ranking, and specifically a relevance problem. Reason 7 first, then 6.
“It was on Google and now it has vanished.” Something changed. Go to the section on disappearing sites further down, then come back to reason 2.
Google can only show pages it has found, crawled and stored. On a brand new site that process takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and there is no way to buy your way past it.
The fix. Verify the site in Google Search Console, submit your XML sitemap, then use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing on your homepage and your two or three most important pages. Requesting indexing is a nudge, not a guarantee, but it reliably shortens the wait.
This is the single most common cause we find, and it is almost always an accident.
WordPress has a setting under Settings > Reading called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Developers tick it during a build so the unfinished site stays private, then forget to untick it at launch. While it is on, Google will politely stay away no matter what else you do, and nothing else on this list will help.
The fix. Untick it, save, then request reindexing in Search Console. If you use Yoast or Rank Math, also check the per-page SEO settings, because either plugin can carry its own noindex on an individual page or an entire post type.
Your robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your site they may crawl, and a single stray Disallow: / line locks Google out of everything.
The fix. View yours at yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / on its own under User-agent: *, that is your answer. One wrong line here quietly undoes every other thing on this page, so if you are not confident reading it, our free SEO audit checks it for you in a couple of minutes.
Search Console is free, and without it you are guessing. It is the only place Google will tell you directly why a page is or is not indexed.
The fix. Verify ownership, submit your sitemap, then read the Page Indexing report. It names the specific reason for every excluded page, which turns this whole article into a two-minute check.
Even a perfectly built, fully indexed site does not rank straight away. Google needs to see that a site is real, useful and worth trusting, and that judgement is not instant.
The honest answer. Expect indexing within days to weeks, and meaningful search traffic within three to six months of consistent work. If you launched a fortnight ago and everything above checks out, patience is genuinely the fix. Anyone promising number one rankings next week is selling you something that does not exist.
A handful of pages with a few lines each gives Google very little reason to prefer you over the dozen established sites already answering the same question.
The fix. Pick your most commercially important page and make it genuinely complete. Answer the questions customers actually ask you on the phone. Depth on the pages that matter beats a thin page for every service you have ever offered, and it is worth reading Google’s own Search Essentials to see what they expect.
This is the one that catches most businesses, and it is not really an SEO problem. It is a wording problem.
You may have a strong page that answers a different question from the one people type. If someone searches “emergency plumber Sheffield” and your best page is a general “About our services” page, Google has better matches available, and it will use them. The page is not bad. It is just not about that.
The fix. Search your target term yourself and look at what ranks. If the results are all location-and-service pages and yours is a general overview, that gap is your answer. Working out which page should target which search, and then rewriting it so it does, is most of what our SEO work actually consists of.
Links from other reputable sites act as votes of confidence, and a new site with none has very little to stand on when competing for anything valuable.
The fix. Get listed properly in the places genuinely associated with your area and trade: your local chamber of commerce, relevant trade bodies, real local directories. One link from an organisation actually connected to your town is worth more than fifty generic directory submissions, and the bulk-link services that promise otherwise cause more harm than good.
If you are a local business this is also where a Google Business Profile comes in, though a profile on its own will not carry you. We have written about why a Google Business Profile alone is not local SEO and what has to sit behind it.
Speed affects rankings, and it affects enquiries considerably more. A site that takes six seconds on a phone loses people before they have read a word.
The fix. Compress and correctly size your images, put proper caching in place, and watch Core Web Vitals in Search Console. Images are almost always the biggest single win and the easiest one. There is more in our guide to website performance and why it matters more than you think.
Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your site to decide how to index and rank it. If your site is cramped or broken on a phone, that is the version being judged.
The fix. Open it on an actual phone rather than a narrow browser window. Check that text is readable without pinching, that buttons are far enough apart to tap, and that nothing runs off the side of the screen.
Google has treated HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014, and browsers now actively warn people away from sites without it. A “Not secure” warning in the address bar costs you visitors regardless of where you rank.
The fix. Install an SSL certificate and move the site properly to HTTPS, including redirects from the old HTTP URLs. We have written a separate guide on why a website comes up as not secure if that warning is what brought you here.
If the same content sits on several URLs, Google may not know which to show and can end up giving none of them much prominence. Far more rarely, a site picks up a manual action for breaking Google’s spam policies.
The fix. Use canonical tags and proper redirects so there is one clear version of every page. For manual actions, Search Console tells you outright under Manual Actions, and nothing else will recover until it is resolved.
A site that vanishes after being visible is a different problem from one that never appeared, and the cause is almost always something that changed rather than something that was always wrong.
In rough order of how often we find them:
Where to look first. Search Console, every time. The Page Indexing report will normally name the cause directly, and comparing the date things dropped against your own change log usually closes the case in minutes.
Worth saying plainly: four of those five causes are things nobody notices until the traffic has already gone. A lapsed certificate, an overwritten robots.txt and a redesign that dropped its redirects all announce themselves weeks later, in Search Console, after the damage. Keeping an eye on them is exactly what a website maintenance plan is for.
The causes above apply to every platform, but each one has a favourite.
WordPress. The “Discourage search engines” box, followed by a plugin-level noindex in Yoast or Rank Math. Between them these account for most WordPress cases we see. Our complete guide to WordPress websites covers how these settings fit together with the rest of the build.
Wix and Squarespace. Both have a site-wide search-engine visibility toggle in their SEO settings, and both default to hiding sites that have never been published properly. Check that the site is actually published, not just saved.
Shopify. Password protection left on after launch blocks crawlers entirely, and Shopify’s automatic collection URLs can create duplicate content that dilutes your product pages.
Indexing a new site typically takes a few days to a few weeks. Ranking well for terms people actually compete over takes longer, usually three to six months of consistent, genuine work.
Requesting indexing in Search Console speeds up the first part. There is no legitimate shortcut for the second, because what you are waiting for is Google deciding your site is worth trusting, and that is earned rather than triggered.
Search site:yourdomain.co.uk in Google. If your pages appear, you are indexed. If nothing shows, Google does not have your site, and the fix is to verify it in Search Console and submit your sitemap.
If searching your business name does not return your site, you are almost certainly not indexed, so run the site: search above. If your name returns your site but your services do not, you are indexed and the issue is relevance rather than indexing.
Nine times out of ten it is the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings > Reading, left ticked after the build. Untick it, save, then request reindexing. If that box is clear, check for a noindex setting in Yoast or Rank Math.
You are indexed but not ranking for competitive terms. That is a content, relevance and authority problem rather than an indexing one, so reasons 6 to 8 above are where to start.
Usually an accidental noindex added during a redesign, an overwritten robots.txt, a lapsed SSL certificate, or URLs changed without redirects. Search Console normally points straight at it.
Yes, entirely. It is the single most useful thing you can set up if you want to understand why your site is or is not appearing, and it takes about ten minutes.
No. Plenty of sites rank well with no blog at all. What matters is having pages that properly answer what people search for. A blog is one way to do that, not a requirement.
No. Ads and organic results are separate systems, and spending on one does not influence the other. Ads can put you in front of people today, but they do nothing for the rankings you keep when you stop paying.
If you have worked through all of this and your site still is not appearing, the cause is usually something small and specific rather than anything on this list, and it is genuinely difficult to spot on your own site.
Our free SEO audit checks indexing, robots.txt, noindex tags and speed automatically, and will normally find it in a couple of minutes. If you would rather we just looked at it properly for you, that is what our SEO service is for. It is also worth reading what we would do with 30 minutes to improve a local ranking.
Need help getting your website found on Google? Get in touch or call us on 01302 315 156 and we will take a look.
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