This is one of the difficult challenges that most businesses face. They find it difficult to become visible for their industry's most valuable keywords on Google Search Engine Results Pages.
Imagine you are a business owner with a website, and you go online to search for important keywords that are related to your industry, and alas, your competitor’s websites are showing while yours is nowhere to be found.
Now you are thinking to yourself, “Why should my competitors become visible on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs), while my own website is not showing up on the first page?”
I have answers to your doubt question, you are the reason why I wrote this blog post. So, relax, and take your time to read along as I walk you through how you can fix your website visibility problems so that you can improve your website online rankings, and increase your bottom line.
Why It Is Important to Rank for Search Engine
Before I dive deeper into why your website is not ranking on the search engine for your industry-targeted keywords, I need to let you know the important reason why it is necessary for your website to become visible on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Search Engine is a big player in the success of many businesses. Google alone gets more than 5.6 billion searches daily while the first 3 pages on Google Results Pages (SERPs) get a whopping 75% click-through- rate.
More than 50% of most businesses' online revenue comes from targeted traffic derived from search engines.
With the facts stated above, it means that your business is losing lots of revenue if it doesn’t earn a spot at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) because most of your target audience will not be able to find you.
This left you with a task to quickly identify, and fix any problem that might be affecting your website from achieving its full potential, which is to bring in revenue to the company pocket.
6 Reasons your site is not ranking on the search engine and how to fix it
There are different factors that might be preventing your website from ranking properly on the search engine, or why it is not visible to your target customers online.
Listed below are six reasons why most websites find it difficult to rank properly on the search engine, and how you can fix it.
1. Your website isn’t indexed
If your website is not indexed by Google Search Engine it will not show up in the search engine results pages. There are various reasons why Google might not crawl or index your website. Some of these reasons are:
- 1New Website: It will take Google several weeks to index your website, and start noticing changes if your website is new. This is because the website is yet to be properly optimized for search engines to start to crawl it.
- 2Your website has a robot.txt file: If your website is an old website, like one year old, and it is not visible on Google. There is a possibility that you have “no index” tags on your website.
Adding “no index” code to your website will prevent google search engine bots from crawling, and indexing some of your web pages.
Although according to some instances that you will need “no index” tags on your website, it is good you consult an SEO Professional to make sure that you do it the right, and it doesn’t affect other web pages you want to rank from becoming visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Additionally, a robot.txt file has the capacity to prevent Google Bot from crawling your entire website, with this you have to make sure you did not accidentally prevent some of the web pages you want to rank for.
WordPress websites have built-in features that give instructions to search engines not to index your website.
To disable the setting manually, you need to visit settings on your WordPress dashboard, go to reading after clicking on the settings, then check the box next to search engine visibility.
If your website is not indexed on Google then you will need to request Google to index it for you. To start you will need to create a Google Search Console account
Opening a search console account will allow you to submit your sitemap.xml to Google for Indexing.
Meanwhile, you need to keep in mind that indexing your website is not guaranteed by Google, and if your website is a new one you will have to be patient, because it may take some time before your website starts ranking.
2. Your website has been penalized by Google
Google penalties can prevent your website from ranking in the search engine. If your website is not a new one, and you have no robot.txt file, then it might be that your website doesn’t meet Google requirements.
If your website doesn’t meet Google quality requirements, it might get penalized which will prevent it from ranking, or becoming visible on the search engine.
If your website is penalized by Google it will might get deindexed, penalized, or sandboxed.
- Deindexed: Your domain is completely removed from search engine results pages (SERPs) by Google.
- Penalized: While your domain exists, you can’t locate your web pages through a direct online search. This type of penalty can be caused by a Google algorithm update, or it is manually applied by Google.
- Sandboxed: Your website search engine traffic drops suddenly, but your domain wasn’t penalized, or deindexed by Google.
How to fix your Google Penalty: Go to your Google Search Console for penalty alerts. If you found out that your website is penalized, you will need to take the necessary steps to modify your website to meet up with Google’s requirements.
After you are done you will have to re-submit your website to Google for reconsideration.
3. Your website isn’t optimized for search Engine Visibility
If your website is not showing up on the search engine for industry-related keywords and you are thinking about what the problem could be.
The first thing you need to look at is your SEO strategy. If you don’t have any then it is the right time you come up with one.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the marketing strategy that makes sure your website is visible to your target customers.
It does this by making sure your website rank and become visible on the first page of Google SERPs.
SEO is mostly used by various online businesses to acquire target customers without spending their fortune.
A properly executed SEO campaign will increase your website's search engine rankings and it will also earn you more conversions.
It is not enough to only have a beautifully designed website; a website without SEO is like a New Car parked in its owner's garage, without driving it out you won’t know its full potential.
Without SEO your website won’t bring the target customers that are supposed to buy from you or pay for your service. The absence of website optimization will make it hard for your targeted audience to locate you online.
How to Optimize a website to make it visible on Search Engine.
To get started, the first thing to do is to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit of your website.
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit will allow you to identify areas of your website that need improvement and fix the necessary things to earn the top spot on the search engine.
If you want to conduct the SEO audit yourself: below are a few website recommendations you have to look at;
4. Your websites don’t have Quality Content.
Quality content is also a major determinant search engines use to rank a website. It will be difficult for your website to rank if its content is of low quality. Search engines only rank high-quality content that answers online users’ questions.
The content you should create and publish on your website should be comprehensive enough to answer your target customer's queries.
Your content should be able to solve the problems of your target customers so they can be satisfied with the answers you have provided to them without them going to another website.
Quality content doesn’t mean you need to create a full-length “How to” guide to rank in SERPs.
Quality content means you need to provide your target customers with educational content that will make them want to come back to your website.
If your website content is nothing to talk about, you can partner with me to create custom web content for your website. I know what it takes to rank on the search engine.
Seeing this article is also a proof that I can provide you with great content that will increase your website visibility in SERPs.
Contact me to beef up your website with great content and earn your spot on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
5. Your Content keywords are too competitive
If your website content is great and you still find it difficult to rank in search results then I can say that you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords.
You might be targeting the exact phrase keywords that are hard to rank for. Exact phrase keywords are highly competitive to rank for because they are targeted by lots of organizations (Small and Large).
If you are a small business then it is to rank for highly-competitive results, especially if you are competing with bigger brands that have a high budget for content marketing strategy.
Instead of competing for highly targeted keywords, you can target long-tail keywords. This will give you the opportunity to rank and become visible in search results.
Long-tail keywords are long search queries with more specific search intent. For example, if an online user searches for a generic keyword like, “Divorce,” it’s hard to determine the exact thing they want to know.
To answer their search query, it is best we add more words to their search query like “How to get a divorce attorney,” “How much does it cost to hire a divorce attorney?”
These are long tail keywords that target the exact purpose of online users' queries, and you need to create quality content that will answer the questions properly.
If you don’t know how to go about your website keywords strategy, or if you want to outsource your SEO strategy and focus on what other important aspects of your business you can schedule a 30-minute SEO strategy session with me.
Any successful SEO campaign begins with comprehensive keyword research.
6. Your website has a poor user experience (UX)
The last we need to look at is your website user experience (UX). If your website UX is bad then you will not rank, nor gain visibility in the search results.
The main job of search engines is to rank quality and valuable content from websites that provide online users with a great experience.
Your website must be able to provide a great experience to online users if you want to see it rank.
Seamless website experience will bring in more online users to your website and this will signal to Google that your website is providing users with a great experience which will make it rank for more keywords.
If your website UX is poor this is the right time to improve it and earn your search results spot.
Websites will great UX experience has lower bounce rates and higher Click-through-rate.
To fix your website's poor UX, below are few things you need to look at
- You need to make sure your website doesn’t take time before it loads.
- You need to minify your website images if there are too many images in it.
- You should also make sure your website is easy to navigate.