Your business relies on search traffic to reach new customers and connect with people. But what happens when your website isn’t showing up in Google searches? This can be a huge problem for your business. Let’s break down some of the reasons why your customers can’t find your website on Google (and how to fix them).
1. Your Website Isn’t Indexed Yet
One common mistake I’ve seen is search engine visibility has been turned off within WordPress. Luckily this is a quick and easy fix.
You’ll want to login to your WordPress website, go to Settings then to Reading. At the bottom you will see a section labeled Search Engine Visibility. If you see a check mark in the box this means that you DO NOT want search engines to index the website.
There are a few reason why this setting may be turned on:
1) At some point maybe you were in a development state and didn’t want the site indexed until complete and maybe forgot to turn it back on.
2) Maybe you have content that you don’t want index such as paid content. In that case you’d want to discourage at the page level and not the entire website.
One of the biggest reasons that your website isn’t showing up is because it’s not indexed. If your website is new, it will take a while for Google’s bots to crawl and index it. This means that you won’t show up in searches at first. Plus, new websites don’t have as many (or as many quality) inbound links, so Google won’t rank them highly yet.
You’ll 1st want to check to see if your website is already indexed. You can do this by going to Google and typing site:your domain name. So for instance in this example I used site:cyfairchamber.com. If your site has been crawled you’ll see a list of pages from your website. If you don’t see a list, you’ll want to create and submit your sitemap to Google.
Another possible explanation is that your website has “no index” tags, which especially tends to happen on older websites. Normally, these tags prevent search bots from indexing specific pages of your website. There are instances where it’s helpful, but it can potentially prevent your website from showing up.
How do you fix this? You need to create an account on Google Search Console (check out video above to see how to do this). Then, you can request that Google crawl through and index your website. Make sure to also update any “no index” tags found within your website’s code, and be patient with the process.
2. Your Website Doesn’t Have High-Quality Content
If you don’t have valuable content on your website, you probably won’t find your website in Google search results. Since Google ranks websites that provide high-quality content, you have to provide it! Make sure everything you write on your website is comprehensive and answers reader’s or customer’s questions. Although you don’t need super long content, it needs to have value and encourage visitors to stick around and take the next step with you.
If you know your content leaves something to be desired, work with a writer or graphic designer to get things back in shape. Remember to add new content regularly, too! Images should be relevant and have SEO-friendly text characteristics like alt-text.
3. Your Website Isn’t Focused on SEO
This goes hand and hand with having high quality content. SEO is search engine optimization. Basically, it’s using different strategies and techniques to ensure that your website is optimized to rank at the top of a specific keyword search. Your website design could be absolutely amazing, but without SEO, it’s not going to rank. No one will be able to find and experience that amazing website, or take the next steps and work with you. Make sure you have a great, seamless website user experience that’s centered around SEO. Add specific search keywords and target those keywords so that your business will show up in searches. Streamline your site’s navigation and remember to regularly add quality pieces of new content.
These 3 key elements could be the reason why your website isn’t showing up for customers on Google. It’s so important to address these issues and get your website back on track. Evielutions Design has website care packages that will help take the work out of this for you!