To show up on Google, three things have to work: Google must be able to find your page, be able to read it, and consider it a better answer than your competitors'. In practice that means submitting your site in Search Console, creating a Google Business Profile and building a separate page for every service you sell.
The groundwork takes an afternoon. Then nothing happens for three weeks, and that is where most people give up.
How does Google find your website?
Google works in three steps, and it is worth keeping them apart because the problem is almost always in one of them.
First Google's robot crawls the web by following links. If it finds no way into your site, it does not know the site exists. Then the page is indexed, meaning it is stored in Google's database — but only if the robot judges it worth storing. Finally it is ranked against every other page about the same thing, every time someone searches.
If you are stuck at step one, it does not matter how good the text is. If you are indexed but sitting at position 40, that is an entirely different problem with an entirely different fix.
Is your website even indexed?
Check this before you do anything else. Search Google like this:
`site:yourwebsite.com`
If you get a list of your pages, you are indexed. If you get zero results, you are not in Google's index at all, and everything else is pointless until that is solved.
Count the results too. If you have fourteen subpages but only three appear, eleven pages are missing somewhere — usually because they are not linked from the menu or because they are blocked by the site's robots.txt.
Eight things that actually make a difference
The order is not random. Points one and two have an effect within weeks. Points seven and eight take months.
1. Submit the site in Google Search Console
Search Console is free and the only place where you see what Google actually thinks of your site. Verify the domain, upload your sitemap (usually `yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml`) and request indexing of the home page.
This is also the tool you go back to every time something is wrong. Under "Pages" you see exactly which pages are indexed and which are not, with the reason given.
2. Get a Google Business Profile
For a local service business the business profile is often more important than the website. It is what gives you the map box at the top, the phone number, the opening hours and the reviews — everything that shows before the organic results even begin.
It is free, takes twenty minutes to fill in and requires no website. Add your category, service area and services, and upload real photos of jobs you have done. Stock photos of smiling people in overalls do nothing for anyone.
3. One page per service — not one lump page
The most common mistake is a single page called "Our services" with everything on it. Google can only rank one page for one query, and a page about eight things ranks for none of them.
If you sell bathroom renovation, tiling and flooring, that should be three pages. Each page gets its own heading, its own text and its own address. It sounds like more work, and it is, but it is also the difference between ranking and not ranking.
4. Write out the town
"Electrician" is in practice impossible to rank for. "Electrician Sundbyberg" is entirely doable. Put the town in the heading, in the text and in the page address, and list the areas you actually travel to.
If you work in five towns you can make five pages, but only if each page gets its own content. Five identical pages where only the town name is swapped are filtered out by Google, and fixing that afterwards takes more time than doing it right from the start.
5. Title and meta description
The title is the blue link in the search result. The meta description is the two lines underneath. Google sometimes rewrites them, but if you write nothing at all it takes whatever it likes from the page.
Keep the title under 60 characters, include both the service and the town, and put the most important part first. The description should give a reason to click: price, response time, that you are approved for the ROT deduction. Something concrete, not "welcome to us".
6. Answer the questions customers actually ask
Think about the questions you get on the phone every week. What does it cost to replace a fuse box? How long does a bathroom take? Is material included?
Every one of those questions is a search query, and they are also easier to rank for than the broad terms. A page that answers "what does it cost to rewire a flat" head-on has an honest chance, while the same site never gets near "electrician".
This is also what gets you into Google's AI summaries and into ChatGPT. Language models pick up concrete answers with numbers in them, and skip text that says "the price varies depending on your needs".
7. Make sure the page loads fast on mobile
Around three in four people searching for a tradesperson do it on their phone. Test your site in Google PageSpeed Insights and look only at the mobile score. If it is below 50 something is seriously wrong, usually images uploaded at full camera size.
Compressing the images is the single most effective thing you can do in ten minutes.
8. Links and mentions
Links from other sites are still one of the heaviest signals. You do not need a hundred. The trade association, the suppliers you work with, the local sports club you sponsor, the business directories — that goes a long way for a small company.
Reviews belong here too. They do not rank the website directly, but they decide whether people click on you or the next result, and they affect your placement in the map results.
Why doesn't your website show up on Google?
If you have done everything above and still are not found, it is usually one of these:
The site is brand new. During the first two to three months it is normal to barely show up at all. There is nothing to do about it except keep going.
The page is blocked technically. A `noindex` tag left over from when the site was built, or a robots.txt that shuts Google out. Search Console says outright if that is the case.
You are searching for the wrong thing. Searching for your own company name and finding yourself is no proof that you are visible. Search for what customers search for.
The content is too thin. A page with four sentences and one image gives Google nothing to go on.
The competition is too tough for the term you chose. That is not a fault, just a signal to aim narrower first.
How long does it take?
A new page is usually indexed within 3 to 14 days after you request indexing in Search Console. Starting to rank for something meaningful takes longer: count on two to three months for local search terms with low competition, and six months or more for broader terms.
You cannot buy your way past that queue. Google Ads gives traffic immediately, but does not affect the organic placements at all — they are two separate systems.
When your own website is not enough
Everything above assumes two things: that you have a website, and that you have time to look after it. For quite a few service businesses neither is true. The site was built in 2019, nobody has touched it since, and whoever built it no longer answers the phone.
Then the question is not how to make that particular page rank, but where you should be visible instead.
Marketit — visibility without building anything yourself
Marketit is a marketplace for services where you as a company get a profile that does the job a website would otherwise do. You can see how it works and check pricing and terms before you decide.
You do not need your own website. The profile is your public page, with services, photos, service area and reviews. The technical side — indexing, load time, structure, mobile layout — sits with us. You fill in your information and you are done.
You show up in the AI chats. More and more people start by asking ChatGPT or Google's AI answers instead of scrolling through ten blue links. Marketit's pages are built to be readable and quotable by that kind of assistant, which is hard to pull off on your own with a small site.
You can quote on jobs directly. Customers post jobs they want done, and you answer the ones that fit. The difference from waiting for someone to find your website is that the person has already decided to buy. We do not resell leads to five competitors — the matching is based on visibility, not on how many have paid for the same contact.
A complete CRM is included. Customers, requests, quotes and follow-up in one place, instead of spread across email, texts and the notepad in the van.
We advertise for you. We have calculated what a lead costs across four channels. Marketit runs Google and Meta advertising to bring customers to the platform. So you do not have to set up accounts, manage bidding or spend your own ad budget to get traffic.
That does not rule out having your own website. If you have a good site you should keep it and link between the two. But if the alternative is a website nobody maintains, the profile is both faster and more visible.