How to Get Your Website on Google — A Step-by-Step Guide for Small Businesses

How to Get Your Website on Google — A Step-by-Step Guide for Small Businesses

You built your website. You're proud of it. You search for your business on Google and it's nowhere to be found.

This is one of the most common and most frustrating experiences for small business owners. The good news: getting your website on Google is not as complicated as it sounds. The bad news: most website builders don't tell you any of this when they hand you the keys.

This guide walks you through every step — in plain language, without assuming you know what a sitemap is.

Why Your Website Isn't on Google Yet

First, the important thing to understand: Google doesn't automatically know your website exists just because you published it. Google has to discover it, crawl it, and decide to include it in its index before it can appear in any search results.

This process is called indexing. Until your pages are indexed, they are completely invisible to Google — no matter how good your content is, how fast your site loads, or how much you paid for it.

There are three main reasons a new website isn't on Google:

1. Google hasn't discovered it yet

Google finds pages by following links. If no other website links to yours, and you haven't told Google it exists, Google may not find it for weeks or months.

2. You haven't submitted a sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists every URL on your website and tells Google where to find them. Without one, Google has to discover your pages one link at a time — slowly and incompletely.

3. Technical issues are blocking Google

A misconfigured robots.txt file, a noindex tag on your pages, or missing canonical tags can actively prevent Google from indexing your site even after it finds it.

The good news: all of these are fixable, and most take less than an hour.

Step 1 — Set Up Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free tool for website owners. It's how you communicate directly with Google about your site — submitting sitemaps, requesting indexing, and seeing how Google views your pages.

If you don't have Search Console set up, this is the first thing to do. Everything else depends on it.

How to set it up:

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console
2. Click "Add property"
3. Enter your domain (e.g. krubly.com)
4. Verify ownership — the easiest method is the HTML tag method: Google gives you a tag to paste into your website's section
5. Once verified, you have full access to your site's Search Console data

Setup takes approximately 15 minutes. Once done, Google will begin collecting data about your site within a few days.

Step 2 — Create and Submit a Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that lists every URL on your website. It's the most direct way to tell Google "these are the pages I want you to index."

Creating your sitemap:

Most modern website platforms generate a sitemap automatically. Check if yours exists by going to:

yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you see a page full of XML code listing your URLs — you have a sitemap. If you get a 404 error — you don't, and you need to create one.

For Next.js sites, you can create a sitemap automatically using the built-in app/sitemap.ts file. For WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin generates one. For Wix and Squarespace, sitemaps are generated automatically.

Submitting your sitemap to Google:

1. Go to Search Console
2. Click "Sitemaps" in the left menu
3. Enter your sitemap URL: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
4. Click Submit

Google will now use your sitemap as a guide for which pages to crawl and index. You'll see the status update within a few days showing how many URLs were submitted and how many were indexed.

Step 3 — Request Indexing for Your Most Important Pages

Even after submitting a sitemap, Google doesn't always crawl every page immediately. For new websites with low domain authority, Google allocates minimal crawl budget — it may find your pages but put off crawling them for weeks.

The solution is to manually request indexing for your most important pages.

How to request indexing:

1. Go to Search Console
2. Paste a URL into the search bar at the top (e.g. yourdomain.com/blog/my-article)
3. Click "Request Indexing"
4. Google will crawl that specific page within 1–7 days

Do this for:

• Your homepage
• Your most important service or product pages
• Your newest blog posts
• Any page you specifically want to rank for a keyword

You can request indexing for up to around 10 pages per day. Start with your most important pages and work through the rest over time.

Step 4 — Check Your robots.txt File

Your robots.txt file tells Google's crawler which pages it's allowed to access. A misconfigured robots.txt is one of the most common reasons websites don't appear on Google — and it's completely invisible to the business owner.

Check yours by going to: yourdomain.com/robots.txt

A correct, basic robots.txt looks like this:

`

User-agent: *

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

`

If you see Disallow: / — you are blocking Google from your entire site. This is a critical error that will prevent any page from being indexed regardless of anything else you do.

Also check that your important pages are not accidentally blocked. Any line that says Disallow: /page-name will prevent that specific page from being indexed.

Step 5 — Add Schema Markup

Schema markup is code you add to your pages that tells Google specifically what type of content they contain. Without it, Google has to guess what your business is, what you sell, and who you serve. With it, Google knows precisely — and can show enhanced results (rich snippets) in search.

For small businesses, the most important schema types are:

Organization schema — tells Google your business name, website, and social profiles. Goes on every page.

LocalBusiness schema — tells Google your address, phone number, opening hours, and service area. Critical for appearing in local search and Google Maps.

Article schema — tells Google each blog post is an article, with a published date, author, and publisher. Helps blog posts rank faster.

FAQPage schema — if your pages have Q&A sections, this schema can trigger FAQ rich results in Google — expanded listings that take up significantly more space in search results and dramatically improve click-through rates.

Schema is written in JSON-LD format and goes in the section of your pages. Most small business owners don't add it because it requires some technical knowledge — which is why most small business websites are missing it entirely, and why the ones that have it tend to rank better.

Step 6 — Build Internal Links

Internal links — links from one page on your site to another — are how Google discovers new content and understands which pages are most important.

When Google crawls your homepage and finds a link to a blog post, it follows that link and crawls the blog post. When it crawls the blog post and finds links to other articles, it follows those too. The more internal links a page has pointing to it, the more authority Google assigns to it.

For small business websites, the practical implication is simple: make sure every important page on your site is linked from at least one other page. Orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them — are very slow to get indexed and rank poorly.

Step 7 — Be Patient (But Not Passive)

Getting indexed is not instant. For a brand new website:

• Homepage and main pages: typically indexed within 1–2 weeks of requesting
• Blog posts: 1–4 weeks after requesting indexing
• First keyword rankings: 4–12 weeks after indexing
• Consistent page 1 rankings: 3–6 months for low-competition keywords

The businesses that rank well are the ones that did the technical setup correctly from the start and then published consistent content over months — not the ones that published once and waited.

The Part Nobody Tells You

Everything above works — but it's also a significant amount of setup. Most small business owners don't have time to learn XML sitemaps, schema markup, and robots.txt configuration on top of running their actual business.

This is exactly the problem Krubly's SEO plans are designed to solve. When you build a site with Krubly, the entire technical foundation — sitemap, schema markup, robots.txt, canonical tags, internal linking structure — is set up automatically from day one. When you publish a new blog post, it's added to the sitemap instantly. When you add a new service page, schema markup is generated automatically.

You don't have to learn any of this. You don't have to configure any of this. Krubly handles the technical SEO foundation so you can focus on your business.

[See Krubly's SEO plans →]