Where is my website on Google?

What page of Google is my website on?

Search the way a customer would, on your phone: the job and a town you work in, like roof repair Chippewa Falls. Look at the map with three businesses on it, then the list under it, and keep going page after page until you find your site. Where you find it is where you are for that search.

Someone else can find you on a different page. Google says the results a person gets can depend on where they are, their language and their device, so a customer in the next town can see a different list. Run the same search for every town you work in and write down where you land, with the date.

Searching your own business name doesn't count. Almost any site shows up for its own name. The question is whether you show up for the work, in the town, when the person searching has never heard of you.

How to see your position in Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free tool for your own site. Once you've proved you own the site, open the Performance report. The Queries tab lists the searches that brought your site up. Click one, then the Pages tab, to see which of your pages Google showed for it. Google leaves some searches out to protect people's privacy.

Position is how far down the results your link sat. Google counts the top result as 1 and the next as 2, takes the highest spot your site held each time it was shown, and averages them. The lower the number, the higher you are. Google suggests watching how impressions and clicks change over time more than position alone.

Impressions are how often someone saw a link to your site. Clicks are how often someone clicked it. A search with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks is one where you're being shown and passed over.

Why a live site can still be missing

Being online and being shown are two different things. Google has to find the page, decide it's worth listing, and then decide it's the right answer for a search in a town. A page can be live for a year and never be shown, because it says nothing about the towns and nothing Google can use.

The usual reasons: the site only names your home town; it's one page with everything on it; the pages for other towns are copies with the name changed; or nobody ever told Google the pages exist. Every one of those is fixable, and none of them has anything to do with how good your work is.

What it looks like when a site works

A site that's working shows up for the job and the town, in town after town, on pages that are about those towns. A concrete coating company we built for, out of River Falls, Wisconsin, shows up in 27 towns across Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site, they came up on Google 5.9x more often and got 2.7x more visits.

That's what the checks should find: your site on the list for the job, in the towns you drive to, not just at home. Each of those towns has its own page on their site, written about that town, and that's the whole difference.