You launched three weeks ago. You search your business name and nothing comes up, or the wrong page comes up. Before assuming you need to pay someone, check these four things — in this order.
1. Google hasn't got to you yet
This is the most common answer and the least satisfying one. A brand new domain with no inbound links has nothing telling Google it's worth crawling. Google will find it eventually, but "eventually" can mean weeks.
Set up Google Search Console first — it's free, and without it you're guessing. Verify your site, submit a sitemap, then use the URL Inspection bar at the top to submit your most important pages for indexing.
In the Pages report you will likely see a status called Discovered — currently not indexed. That means Google knows the page exists and hasn't decided it's worth crawling yet. It is not an error and there is no technical fix. It resolves as your site accumulates content and links.
2. Your pages redirect to a different address than the one you submitted
This one catches almost everybody who uses a modern static host.
Several hosting platforms automatically strip the .html from your URLs. A visitor asking for yoursite.ca/about.html is silently redirected to yoursite.ca/about. That's fine for people. It's a problem if your sitemap still lists the .html version, because Google follows the sitemap, hits a redirect on every page, and files them under Page with redirect instead of indexing them.
Check it in ten seconds: open your own sitemap.xml in a browser, then open one of the URLs listed in it. If the address in the bar changes when the page loads, your sitemap is pointing at the wrong addresses. Fix the sitemap to list the final addresses.
3. Two addresses serve the same page and you never said which one is real
Following on from the last point: once both /about.html and /about exist, Google sees duplicate content and has to guess which is the true version. In Search Console this shows up as Duplicate without user-selected canonical.
The fix is a single line in the <head> of each page:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.ca/about">
That tells Google which address to index. Make sure the address in the tag is the one that actually loads without redirecting — a canonical pointing at a redirect defeats the purpose.
Worth knowing: the trust a page earns is split between duplicate addresses. Fixing canonicals doesn't create traffic by itself, but it stops the value of everything else you do from leaking into an address Google may never index.
4. You're accidentally blocking Google
Two files can hide a site completely, and both are usually left over from development.
robots.txt. Open yoursite.ca/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine to ignore the whole site. Staging sites are often built this way and the file gets copied to production.
The noindex tag. View the page source and search for noindex. If it's there, that page will never be indexed regardless of anything else. WordPress has a checkbox under Settings → Reading called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" that does exactly this, and it is very easy to forget to untick.
What not to do
Don't submit your site to a hundred search engines. Don't buy a package of directory listings. Don't rewrite all your pages in week three because rankings haven't appeared — you'll lose whatever progress Google has made and start the clock again.
And don't repeatedly click "Validate Fix" in Search Console. Each click restarts the validation period. Fix the problem once, click once, and check back in two weeks.
A realistic timeline
For a new domain with no history: a few days to a few weeks to get your homepage and main pages indexed, assuming nothing above is blocking you. Ranking for anything competitive is a matter of months, not weeks, and depends far more on content and links than on technical settings.
The technical items in this article are the floor, not the strategy. They're worth doing because without them nothing else you do can work.
Our free SEO audit checks all four of these on your site and tells you which ones apply — no cost, no obligation.