A question I get regularly from Sunshine Coast business owners: “I have a website. Why doesn’t it show up when people search for what I do?”
It’s a fair question and a frustrating situation. You paid for a website. It looks fine. But when a potential customer in Gibsons searches “plumber near me” or “hair salon Sechelt,” you’re nowhere.
The reasons are almost always the same. Here are the five most common ones I find when I audit a local business website, and what they mean in practice.
1. Your Site Is Too Slow
Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. More importantly, speed affects whether people stay on your site once they find it. If your page takes four seconds to load on a mobile connection — which is the norm on the Sunshine Coast, where LTE can be spotty — most visitors have already left.
The biggest culprits:
- Unoptimized images. A photo taken on a phone and uploaded directly to a website is often 4–8 MB. The same photo optimized properly is 200–400 KB. This is the single most common issue I find.
- Cheap hosting. Shared hosting on a server in another country introduces latency before the page even starts loading. This matters more than most people realize.
- Too many plugins. WordPress sites with 25+ plugins are loading 25+ additional files. Every one adds loading time.
How to check: Google PageSpeed Insights is free. Enter your URL and look at your Core Web Vitals. A well-built site should score 90+ on mobile. Most local business websites score 30–60.
2. Google Doesn’t Know Where You Are
Local search is different from regular search. When someone searches “electrician Sunshine Coast” or “restaurant near me,” Google uses a combination of signals to decide which businesses to show: distance, relevance, and prominence.
If your Google Business Profile isn’t set up correctly — or doesn’t exist at all — you’re invisible in local search. Full stop. The map pack (the three businesses that appear above the regular results) is driven almost entirely by your Google Business Profile.
Beyond GBP, consistency matters. Your business name, address, and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear: your website, Google, Yelp, Facebook, local directories. Inconsistencies confuse Google and hurt your local rankings.
How to check: Search your business name on Google. Is there a Knowledge Panel (the box on the right)? Is your Google Business Profile fully filled out, with photos, hours, and regular posts? Does your address appear in the footer of your website?
3. Your Content Doesn’t Match What People Search For
This is the subtlest problem and the hardest to fix. You might have a perfectly functional website that just uses the wrong words.
Your website says: “Providing quality craftsmanship to the communities we serve.”
Your customer searches: “deck builder Gibsons BC.”
Those two things don’t connect. Google isn’t going to rank you for “deck builder Gibsons BC” if you haven’t used those words on your website.
The solution is keyword research and content that actually addresses what people are searching for. Not keyword stuffing — natural, useful content that uses the language your customers use when they’re looking for you.
How to check: Think about how a stranger would describe what you do when searching for it. Are those words on your website? Do you have location-specific content, or does your site never mention Sunshine Coast, Gibsons, Sechelt, or Roberts Creek?
4. Google Can’t Crawl Your Site Properly
This is a technical issue that’s invisible to the naked eye. Your website looks fine to you. But if Google’s crawler can’t access and read the pages properly, they won’t rank.
Common technical issues:
- Pages accidentally set to “noindex.” This tells Google explicitly not to index the page. It happens more often than you’d think, especially on newly launched sites.
- Broken internal links. Pages that link to other pages that no longer exist create dead ends for crawlers.
- No sitemap. A sitemap is a file that tells Google exactly what pages exist on your site. Without one, Google finds your pages by crawling links — slower and less reliable.
- Missing or duplicate meta descriptions. Not a direct ranking factor, but affects whether people click on your result.
How to check: Google Search Console (free) shows you exactly how Google sees your site, including crawl errors, indexed pages, and manual penalties.
5. Nobody Links to You
Search engines use links from other websites as votes of credibility. A website that nobody links to is a website that Google has little reason to trust.
For local businesses, the most important links are:
- Your Google Business Profile (this counts)
- Local directory listings: Yelp, Yellow Pages, the Sunshine Coast Chamber of Commerce website
- Local news mentions
- Industry associations
You don’t need hundreds of links. For a local Sunshine Coast business, five to ten credible local and industry links can make a meaningful difference.
How to check: Ahrefs’ free website checker will show you how many websites link to yours.
The Diagnosis
Most Sunshine Coast business websites I audit have at least three of these five problems. The good news is that they’re fixable. The bad news is that fixing them properly takes more than a weekend of reading blog posts.
If you want to know exactly which of these apply to your site — and in what order they’re worth addressing — that’s what the free diagnostic call is for. I’ll look at your specific situation, tell you what’s holding you back, and give you an honest sense of what’s realistic to improve.
No retainer required to find out what’s wrong.