You type your own company name into Google and… nothing. Or worse, you see three competitors and a directory listing from 2016, but not the business you’ve spent years building.
If you’re running a construction firm, that’s not a vanity problem. Visibility is the difference between a steady stream of serious enquiries and those quiet patches where the phone goes dead and you start taking work you’d normally refuse.
So let’s answer the question properly: why is my business invisible on google? In most cases it’s not one big mystery. It’s a handful of common faults that compound – and Google is unforgiving when the basics are missing.
Most owners judge visibility by doing a few quick searches: your trade + your town, or your company name, from your phone while you’re on site.
That’s understandable, but it can mislead you. Google personalises results based on your location, device, search history, and whether you’re logged in. If you’re stood at your yard, Google may show you more prominently than someone five miles away. If you’ve visited your site a hundred times, you might appear higher for you than for everyone else.
The point is not “don’t trust your eyes”. It’s “don’t assume one search result equals reality”. We want to look at the underlying reasons you’re not showing consistently for the searches that actually bring work in.
If Google doesn’t index a page, it can’t rank it. Simple.
This happens more than people think, especially with newer sites, recent redesigns, or sites built on template platforms where settings get left in the wrong state.
Sometimes the site is blocked by a setting that tells search engines to keep out. Other times it’s a technical file issue, a misconfigured canonical tag (telling Google the “real” page is somewhere else), or pages that only exist behind scripts Google struggles to process.
If your developer pushed the site live in a hurry, it’s also common for key pages to be missing from the XML sitemap, meaning Google finds them slowly or not at all.
The trade-off here is speed vs stability. A quick rebuild gets you a fresher look, but if the technical launch isn’t handled like a proper migration, you can wipe out years of search equity overnight.
A lot of construction websites look the part but say very little. “Quality workmanship”, “friendly team”, “no job too small” – it reads nicely, but it doesn’t map to how buyers search.
Commercial clients, facilities managers, and even homeowners search with intent. They type things like “fire door installation Glasgow”, “roofing contractor East Kilbride”, “shopfitting contractor Edinburgh”, “warehouse refurbishment contractor”, or “principal contractor for commercial fit out”.
If your key pages don’t clearly match those intents, Google has no reason to rank you. Not because you’re not good, but because your site doesn’t give a clear answer.
This is where a lot of SEO goes wrong. Agencies chase broad, feel-good keywords like “builder Glasgow” and then claim it “takes time”. It does take time – but not if you build relevance and coverage properly from the start.
For local search, your Google Business Profile often matters more than your website for map visibility. If you’re invisible in the “map pack” (the three local listings), the first question is whether your profile is:
A weak profile can still show for your company name, but it won’t compete when someone searches “groundworks contractor near me” or “commercial builder [town]”.
And yes, it depends. If you operate across multiple towns and you’re not customer-facing at your address, you need to handle the profile carefully to avoid suspensions. “Just stuff every postcode into it” is the sort of advice that gets profiles nuked.
Construction businesses often have a history: you started with a mobile number, then moved to an office line; you’ve had two yard addresses; the company name has changed slightly; someone set up a Facebook page years ago; a directory scraped your old details.
Google uses consistency as a trust signal. If it sees five variations of your business name and two different phone numbers across the web, you’re not “penalised” in a dramatic way. You’re just less trusted, which means you struggle to rank in competitive local searches.
This is boring work, but it’s commercially important. You don’t need hundreds of directory listings. You need the key ones to be accurate, and you need your website and Google Business Profile to match exactly.
Google doesn’t rank websites based on “design taste”. It ranks them based on whether they load quickly, work on mobile, and deliver a good user experience.
If your site is slow, heavy with bloated plugins, or awkward on mobile, users bounce. Google sees that behaviour and adjusts.
If someone in a car park on 4G clicks your site and it takes seven seconds to load a hero video, they’re gone. If your phone number isn’t tappable, they’re gone. If your service page is a wall of text with no clear proof (projects, accreditations, locations, process), they’re gone.
The trade-off is aesthetics vs speed. Video headers and huge galleries can look impressive, but if they cost you leads, they’re doing the opposite of their job.
Google doesn’t reward “having a website”. It rewards being the best answer.
In construction, that usually means you need pages that clearly cover:
If all your services are crammed onto one page, you’re asking Google to rank a general page for specific searches. That rarely works in competitive areas.
Links still matter. But there’s a big difference between links that build authority and links that are just noise.
If a previous SEO built a pile of cheap directory links or “guest posts” on irrelevant sites, you might not see an obvious penalty message. You’ll just be stuck. Google gets better every year at discounting link manipulation.
On the flip side, many good construction firms have almost no links at all. You’ve done real projects, worked with suppliers, supported local groups, maybe been on a framework – but none of it is reflected online.
This is where a measured approach wins. You don’t need a hundred links. You need a small number of legitimate mentions that fit your real-world footprint.
This is one of the most painful, because it’s avoidable.
If you changed URLs, removed pages, or rewrote headings without a proper redirect plan, Google treats it like a new site. Your old pages might still be indexed, your new ones might not, and authority gets diluted.
Even “small” changes like merging service pages can knock you back if you don’t preserve relevance and internal linking.
If your invisibility started right after a rebuild, don’t waste six months publishing blog posts. Get the technical migration checked first.
In some trades and locations, you’re not only competing with other contractors. You’re competing with directories, national franchises, and lead-gen companies that spend heavily on SEO and ads.
That doesn’t mean you can’t win. It means you need a smarter angle: specific services, specific locations, and proof that matches what serious buyers care about. Procurement teams don’t hire “a builder”. They hire a contractor with the right capability, compliance, and track record.
If your website doesn’t communicate that in a way Google can understand, you get outranked by businesses that are worse than you but clearer than you.
If you want the fastest path out of invisibility, prioritise what drives enquiries.
Start by making sure Google can crawl and index your key pages, then get your Google Business Profile properly set up and supported by consistent business details. After that, build out service pages that match how people actually search in your patch, and make the site quick and usable on mobile.
Only once those foundations are right does it make sense to invest in authority building and content expansion. Otherwise you’re pouring effort into a bucket with holes.
If you want a straight answer on what’s actually holding you back, this is exactly what we do in a paid audit and SEO Lift at Wicked Spider® – not a generic report, but a prioritised plan tied to leads, locations, and commercial outcomes.
A final thought to leave you with: if your business is genuinely good, “invisible on Google” is rarely a marketing problem. It’s usually a systems problem – and systems can be fixed, properly, once you stop guessing and start measuring what Google is actually seeing.
