There's a difference between a site Google has never seen and a site Google has seen and ranked below everyone else. They feel identical from where you're sitting and they have completely different fixes.
Two minutes of checking tells you which one you have.
First, find out if you're indexed at all
Search Google for site:yourdomain.ca, with no space after the colon. That asks Google to list every page it holds for your domain.
- Pages come back. You're indexed. Your problem is ranking rather than visibility, which has a different set of causes.
- Nothing comes back. Google doesn't have your site. That's a different and usually more fixable problem.
Also search your exact business name. If you can't rank for your own name, something is broken rather than merely competitive.
If Google has nothing at all
A noindex tag left on from staging. This is the first thing to check and it's heartbreakingly common. Sites get built on a temporary address with a tag telling search engines to stay away, and the tag ships to production with everything else. One line, invisible to visitors, and the site is uncrawlable. Anyone can check it: view the page source and search for the word noindex.
The site is new. Give it two to four weeks. New domains don't appear instantly and there's nothing wrong.
It has never been submitted. Set up Google Search Console, verify the domain, and submit your sitemap. This is free and takes fifteen minutes. Search Console is also the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks is wrong.
Robots.txt is blocking crawling. Visit yourdomain.ca/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the entire site.
The site needs JavaScript to show anything. Some builds render nothing until scripts run. Google can handle this but does it slowly and imperfectly. If the page source is empty of your actual words, fix that first.
If you're indexed but nobody finds you
This is the more common situation and the causes are ranked here by how often they turn out to be the answer.
You're checking wrong. Google personalizes results by location, history, and account. Searching your own business while sitting in your own shop, logged in, tells you very little. Use an incognito window, and if you want to check a different town, that's what the location tools in Search Console are for.
There's no page about the thing people search for. A site with a homepage, an about page and a contact page has one page of substance. If someone searches for eavestrough repair and the words eavestrough repair appear nowhere except a list on your homepage, there's nothing for Google to rank. Pages about specific services, and pages about the places you serve, are how this gets fixed, and it's most of what SEO work consists of.
No Google Business Profile. For anything with local intent, the map results sit above the ordinary results. Without a profile you're invisible in the section that gets looked at first, no matter how good the site is. Setting one up is free.
The site is slow or awkward on a phone. Google ranks on the mobile version and page experience is a real factor. Run your address through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile number.
Nobody links to you. Links from other sites remain a major signal. For a local business the accessible ones are real: your suppliers, your trade association, the local chamber, sponsorship pages, genuine directories.
The competition is simply further along. Someone who has been publishing and collecting reviews for eight years is hard to displace on a head term in six weeks. The route through is being more specific: the exact service, the exact town, the exact question.
What to do, in order
- Run the site: search and check for a noindex tag. Rule out the catastrophic causes first.
- Set up Search Console and submit a sitemap. Then read what it tells you.
- Claim and fill in the Google Business Profile.
- Write a real page for each service you sell, and each area you serve.
- Fix mobile speed.
- Start collecting reviews steadily.
- Then wait. Local SEO moves in months.
Nothing on that list moves in thirty days, and nobody can make it. If you want a read on where yours stands, the site audit is free.
