First, find out if Google knows you exist
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back, your site isn't indexed at all — and that's actually the best-case scenario, because it's usually a single fixable cause: a noindex tag left over from development, a robots.txt file blocking crawlers, or a site so new Google hasn't found it. We find launch-leftover noindex tags on live business sites constantly. Developers set them so unfinished sites stay hidden, then forget to remove them.
If your pages are indexed but rank on page five, the problem isn't visibility to Google — it's competitiveness, and the checklist changes.
The technical layer: can Google crawl and trust the site?
Google Search Console is free and tells you most of this directly: which pages are indexed, which were crawled and rejected, and why. Common rejections: pages that redirect in loops, duplicate pages without canonical tags, pages orphaned with no internal links pointing to them, and pages that load so slowly the crawler gives up. Speed failures deserve special attention — a site that fails Core Web Vitals is fighting with a handicap on every single query.
Structured data belongs in this layer too. LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQ markup don't just enable rich results — they remove ambiguity about what your business is and where it operates, which matters enormously for local queries.
The content layer: do you deserve the ranking?
A five-page website cannot rank for thirty services across ten cities. Google matches queries to pages, and if there's no page on your site about drain repair in Statesville, you will lose that search to whoever has one. The businesses that dominate local search have a dedicated, genuinely useful page for every service-city combination they care about — not doorway spam, but real pages with real local content.
This is the layer where most 'my site disappeared' mysteries actually live. The site didn't disappear; a competitor built out fifty pages of relevant content and earned the positions.
Work the list in order
Diagnose in sequence: indexed at all → crawlable and fast → profile and citations consistent → content coverage for the searches you want. Each layer depends on the ones before it. And if you'd rather have the whole diagnosis done for you in a day, that's literally what our free audit is — every layer, your specific site, plain English.