Why Your Contractor Website Isn't Showing Up on Google

Quick Executive Summary

You built a website. Maybe you paid someone a few thousand dollars for it. It looks good. Your photos are on it. Your phone number is on it.

And when you search your own trade in your own town, you're nowhere.

Meanwhile there's a guy two towns over who shows up first, and you've seen his work. You know it isn't better than yours.

Here's what's actually going on, starting with the reason almost nobody checks.

Google might be looking at a blank page

This is the one that gets missed, and it has nothing to do with how your site looks.

A lot of modern website builders assemble the page in the visitor's browser. The homeowner's phone does the work of putting the words on the screen. That's fine for the homeowner. The problem is what happens when Google shows up.

Google can request your page and get back almost nothing. Not a slow page. Not an ugly page. An empty one. Your headline isn't there. Your services aren't there. The towns you serve aren't there. There's just a scrap of code and an instruction telling the browser to build the rest.

Nothing looks broken, which is why nobody tells you. Your site loads. Your photos show up. Everything works for people. It just isn't being read by the thing you need to read it.

This happened to us

We build these systems for contractors, and it happened on our own website.

We built a tool to check for this, and the first site we pointed it at was ours. Google was receiving 3,109 bytes from servicefoxx.com. That's a fragment of code and nothing else. No headline, no services, no pages, no answers to anything a homeowner would ask.

We fixed it that same afternoon. Google now receives 20,358 bytes: every page, every service, every answer.

Same website. Same photos. Same words on the screen. The only thing that changed is whether Google could read any of it.

If it happened to us, it is worth thirty seconds of your time to check yours.

How to test your own site, free, right now

You don't need a tool for this and you don't need to call anybody. Do it on a computer, not your phone.

1. Open your website.
2. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose View Page Source. Not Inspect. View Page Source. They're different and the difference is the whole point.
3. A page of code opens. Press Ctrl+F, or Command+F on a Mac.
4. Type a full sentence that you know is on your homepage. Something from your main headline works well.

If you find that sentence in the code, Google can read your page. You're fine on this one and your problem is somewhere else in this article.

If you don't find it, Google is getting the blank version.

Why View Page Source and not Inspect? Inspect shows you the page after your browser finished building it. Of course your words are there. View Page Source shows you what the server actually sent, which is what Google gets on its first look. Almost everyone who checks this checks it the wrong way and walks away reassured.

The other reasons, in the order they usually matter

If your text was in the source code, work down this list.

Your Google Business Profile isn't finished

For local trades this is usually bigger than your website. If your categories are wrong, your service area is empty, or you've got four photos and no services listed, you're leaving the map results to somebody who filled his out. This is free and most contractors are 60% done.

Every page has the same title

Open two different pages of your site and look at the browser tab. If both say the same thing, Google has been told they're the same page. Same goes for the description that shows up under your listing in search results.

Your pages point at your homepage

There's a line of code called a canonical tag that tells Google which page is the real one. Built wrong, every page on your site says "actually, index the homepage instead of me." Your service pages and town pages then never get indexed at all. We see this constantly on sites built with drag-and-drop tools.

You have one page for everything

A single page listing eleven services will lose to a competitor with one page per service, every time. Google matches the search to a page, and a page about everything is a page about nothing.

No pages for the towns you actually serve

If half your work is in the next county and there's no page saying so, you're invisible to everyone searching from there.

Your pages are thin

Four hundred words with a stock photo and a phone number isn't enough to rank for anything competitive anymore. Google spent this year specifically demoting pages that exist only to have a page.

You're new

Sometimes it's this. A site that went up six weeks ago hasn't had time. It usually takes eight to twelve weeks before anything moves, and anybody who tells you thirty days is selling you something.

What to do about it

If the View Page Source test failed, that's your first job and nothing else you do will matter until it's fixed. Whoever built your site can fix it. Most builders have a setting for it.

If it passed, start with your Google Business Profile, because it's free and it's the biggest single lever in local search. Then get one page for each service you actually want more of.

Once you're showing up, the next question is whether you're catching the calls or losing them. If homeowners find you but you can't pick up while you're on a job, a missed call text-back system keeps the lead in play automatically. We wrote a full guide on missed call text-back for contractors that covers how it works across every trade.

If you want trade-specific examples, we've broken it down for HVAC contractors, roofing contractors, and cleaning companies — same problem, different urgency levels.

You can do all of this yourself. Plenty of contractors do.

If you'd rather see the whole picture before you decide anything, run the free check. It looks at what Google actually receives from your site, whether you're turning up in your own towns, and what's missing. Ninety seconds, no email until you see your score, and it works even if you don't have a website yet.

Take the report and do it yourself if you want. We'd rather you fixed it than stayed invisible.