This is the single most common thing business owners say to us. They have a website. They set up a Google Business Profile months ago. They type their own business name into Google and get nothing — or worse, they get a competitor.
It feels like something is broken. Usually nothing is broken. Google simply has no reason yet to believe your site is the answer to anybody’s question. Here are the five reasons that happens, in the order worth fixing them.
1. Your site has no sitemap or robots file
These are two small text files that sit at the root of your site. The robots file tells search engines they’re allowed to look around. The sitemap hands them a list of every page you want indexed.
Without them, Google has to discover your pages by guessing, which for a brand-new site with no inbound links means it may not discover them at all. This is a thirty-minute fix and it is the first thing we set up on every build.
You can check yours right now: type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. If you get a “page not found”, that’s your first problem.
2. Your pages don’t say where you are
This one catches almost everyone. We regularly open a site for a business based in Nairobi and find that the words “Nairobi” and “Kenya” appear nowhere on it. Not in the title, not in the footer, not on the contact page.
Nobody searches for “dermatology clinic”. They search for “dermatologist in Meru” or “skin clinic near me”. If your pages never mention your town, you are invisible for the exact searches that would send you paying customers.
Put your location in these five places, at minimum:
- The page title, e.g. “Skin Clinic in Meru | Dr. Wendo”
- The main heading on your homepage
- The footer of every page, with your full address
- The contact page, written out as text rather than only in an image
- Your structured business data (more on that below)
3. Your titles and descriptions were never written
Every page has a title and a meta description. These are what actually appear in the Google results list. If yours say something like “Home” or “My Website” or just your business name, you have handed Google nothing to match a search against and given searchers no reason to click.
A workable title format for a local service business is: what you do + where you are + your name. Keep it under roughly sixty characters so it isn’t cut off. The description should read like a sentence you’d actually say to a customer, and it should include the thing they searched for.
4. Google can’t read your business details as data
There is a standard format, called structured data or schema, for telling search engines the machine-readable facts about your business: name, address, phone number, opening hours, services, price range, area served. It sits invisibly in your page code.
This is what powers the information panel that appears beside search results, and it is a strong signal that you are a real, locatable business rather than a parked page. Most small business sites in Kenya don’t have it, which means adding it is one of the cheapest ways to get ahead of your competitors.
5. Your Google Business Profile and your site disagree
You may well have claimed your Google Business Profile — many owners do this before they have a website at all. But a profile on its own is fragile. It gains a lot of weight when the details on it match the details on your website exactly.
Exactly means exactly. If your profile says “Ltd” and your site says “Limited”, or the phone number is formatted differently, or the address is written in a different order, you are weakening the connection. Pick one version of your name, address and phone number and use that identical version everywhere: your site, your Business Profile, your Instagram bio, any directory listing.
What to do this week
- Check whether your site has a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml. If not, that is job one.
- Search your own site for your town name. If it doesn’t appear in your homepage title and heading, rewrite them today.
- Rewrite every page title using the what-you-do plus where-you-are format.
- Make your Google Business Profile details match your website character for character.
- Add business structured data. This one needs someone comfortable in code, but it is a small job.
A note on how long this takes
None of this is instant. Google recrawls sites on its own schedule, and for a new or rarely-updated domain that can take a few weeks. That delay is normal, and it is not a sign the fixes didn’t work. Make the changes, submit your sitemap through Google Search Console, and then leave it alone for a month before judging.
The businesses that win locally are almost never the ones with the prettiest sites. They are the ones whose sites are legible to a search engine and unmistakably rooted in a real place.