Why your Wix site doesn't show up on Google

This comes up on nearly every call. Somebody paid for a site two years ago, it looks fine, and they are nowhere on Google. They have usually decided the platform is the problem.

Occasionally it is. Mostly it is one of five other things, and you can work out which in about ten minutes.

1. You have no Google Business Profile, or it is half filled in

For a local trade this is bigger than the website. When somebody searches "electrician near me" the first thing on the screen is the map, and the map is not your website. It is your Google Business Profile.

Go and look at yours. Is the category right? Is the service area set to the towns you cover? Are there photographs that were taken this decade? Are the hours correct? Does it list your services?

A half-filled profile with four reviews loses to a complete profile with forty, and no amount of website work changes that. If you do one thing this month, do this one.

2. Your pages do not say the words people type

Homeowners do not search for "quality craftsmanship" or "solutions for your home". They search for "ice dam removal wayne nj" and "why is my breaker tripping" and "cost to repave a driveway".

Open your services page. If it says "Residential Services" and then three sentences about your commitment to excellence, Google has nothing to match. There is no page on your site about ice dams, so you do not come up for ice dams.

The fix is boring and it works: one page per job you want to be called about, named the way a customer would say it.

3. Every page has the same title

Look at your browser tab as you click through your own site. If it says your company name on all six pages, that is the single biggest technical problem you have, and it is usually a five-minute fix in whatever dashboard you have.

The title is the blue line in the search result. It is also the strongest signal Google has about what a page is for. Six pages all called "ABC Roofing" tell it that you have one page, six times.

4. Nobody has ever linked to you

Google treats a link from another site as a vote. A brand new site with no votes sits behind a fifteen-year-old competitor with a hundred, even if your site is better.

You do not need a campaign for this. You need the obvious ones that nobody bothers with: your supplier's dealer locator, the local chamber, the trade association you already pay dues to, the manufacturer whose products you are certified to install, the little league team whose shirts you sponsored. Each of those is a real link and most of them are a phone call.

5. It is slow

Google has counted mobile page speed toward rankings since 2018. It matters less than the four things above, but it matters, and it is the one that also costs you the visitors who did find you.

The gap here is bigger than people expect. A template site loaded with plugins routinely takes six or seven seconds to become useful on a phone on a cell connection. A hand-built page does it in under two. Most of that gap is photographs uploaded straight off a phone at four thousand pixels wide.

You can check yours in twenty seconds with the speed check on this site. It runs Google's own test and tells you what is costing you the most time.

So when is the platform the problem?

When you have done the five above and you still cannot fix anything. Specifically:

• You cannot set a different page title and description per page
• You cannot add a new page without paying somebody
• The platform injects scripts you did not ask for and cannot remove
• You are locked into a subscription and the site is not portable

That is a real reason to move. "My site is on Wix" is not, on its own, a reason to spend three thousand dollars.

If you want a second opinion on which of the five is yours, send me the address. I will look and tell you straight, including when the answer is that your site is fine and you should spend the money on review requests instead.

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