Web Design & SEO Blog with Content Marketing Help

Why is my website not ranking in Google? I totally get it…you’ve got a great-looking website, you’re proud of it, but you’re frustrated. No one can find you on Google. You could have the best-looking website in the world but if people can’t find you online you won’t get any enquires or sales. As a web design agency who ALSO specialise in SEO, we get asked these questions all the time by potential clients: - Why can’t our prospective customers find us on Google? - What do we need to do to get our website on the 1st page of Google? Google is the number one most visited website and it drives the majority of search traffic to websites in the world. That’s why it’s so important to have a strong presence in search results. It’s really important that you as the business owner understand what’s wrong with your website and what you can do to fix it. Having reviewed hundreds of websites over the past few years, I’ve found that there are 11 main reasons why your website is not ranking well in search results. So, if you are frustrated with the performance of your website, and you want to fast track to the solutions to fix it, you’ve come to the right place. 1. Competitors. Let’s face it. Some industries are more crowded than others, and some of your competitors might have a huge marketing budget behind them. This is why you might not be ranking on the first page for your main keywords. How can you check for competitors? A simple Google search for your main products or services will give you some indication of the size and weight of your competition. Take a look at the search below for “beds for sale”. As you can see, the number of results is ridiculous (over 173 million). Although lots of these results aren't relevant, you’re still competing with the likes of DFS, Argos and Dreams. These are all huge organisations, and the chance of you getting your small-business website on the first page is slim to none. What can you do about your competition? You could try to focus on a particular segment of your target market. Rather than trying to rank nationally for the keyword “Beds for sale” you could instead focus on a local audience, such as “Beds for sale in Manchester”. If you go after a smaller market, there's less competition and more chance of ranking higher for that geographical location. Another option would be to find a niche within your industry. Rather than aiming for “Beds for sale” you could go for “Children's beds for sale”. There is far less competition for more specific searches, and you stand a better chance of performing well in search results. You have to be realistic, and if your competitors are all large organisations, then you may have to adjust your strategy. You’ll thank me in the long run. 2. Google has not indexed your website. If you have a brand-new website and you're not showing up on Google, it may be because Google hasn't listed you yet. How to find out if your website is indexed. So, how would you know if your website is listed on Google? You can find out by using the following prefix in a google search. site:yoursite.com (without the "www." and "/") If you can see your website showing in search results and you’re at the top, you have nothing to worry about. This means you are indexed. Usually, you will see a full list of all your web pages, and that’s what you’re hoping for. On the other hand, if you're not at the top or showing up at all then the likelihood is that Google hasn't indexed your website yet. How can you index your website with Google? Google should eventually find your website anyway, but it can take a few weeks. Not only that, if something is wrong with your site you won’t know about until weeks down the line. The best thing you can do is to add your website to Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) and provide them with your sitemap. This will tell Google which pages you want to show up in their search results and speed the process along. It will also tell you if there are any technical errors on your website. 3. Your website is not mobile friendly. There’s no doubt about it. Mobile usage is overtaking desktop, which is why having a mobile friendly website is vital. If you don’t, it will seriously impact your rankings in mobile search results. Ideally, your website should be “responsive”, this means when your site is viewed on a mobile phone or an iPad it will take the shape of that particular device. It shouldn’t be hard work and require any dragging and pinching. This is bad user experience, hence the reason Google will punish you. How to find out if your website is responsive. To find out if you have a responsive website visit Google's very own Mobile Friendly Test tool and enter your website URL. It will show you either as a pass or a fail. How can you make your website responsive. If a web designer created your website, speak to them about making it responsive. If you’re lucky, it won’t be too expensive! If you use WordPress and manage your website yourself, you could install a new WordPress theme that is responsive. You may also be able to keep the same theme but buy an additional plugin to make it pass the mobile-friendly test. Worst case scenario, you may have to have your website re-designed. It’s not always easy to convert an old website, and it might be easier to spend the money on a new design entirely. It is extremely important to have a responsive website, for both SEO and user-experience. 4. Meta tags not optimised. Search engines use Meta data to work out what your website is about. Each one of your webpages will have its own set of meta tags and they can be optimised to describe the content on that page. Some of this information will actually show up in search results so you need to know how to change it as it's often the first thing your visitors will see before they click through to your site. Your Title Tags and your Meta Descriptions How can you check you meta-data? You can use this tool to collect a list of your pages along with their meta tags. Simple paste your URLs into the box and click submit. You'll be able to download the full list and see what Google can see. Provided you are using a Content Management System such as WordPress you will have access to update your meta tags very easily using the settings for each page. How can you improve your Title Tags. Your Title Tags are extremely important and they WILL impact your search engines rankings depending on what you include within them. Here are a few tips: Include the keywords you want to rank for. Keep the length under 55 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short. Use a sentence structure like "Bed Sales On Single & Double Beds" rather than "Beds | Single Beds | Double Beds | Cheap Beds" How can you improve your Meta descriptions? You meta descriptions don't count towards your rankings but they do count towards your click through rate. This is why they are important. Here a few tips: Ask a question? This is a good way to entice your potential visitor e.g. Why is my website not ranking in Google? Keep the length under 155 characters to avoid search engines cutting it short. Include a call to action to or phone number to make it easier for people to get in touch. WordPress SEO. If you are using the WordPress platform, then you can install the Yoast SEO plugin and make changes very easily. For more On-page SEO tips you can read this article. 5. Poor content optimisation. Have you optimised your website content for search engines? Believe it or not, Google does actually need your help. We'd like to think that they have all the answers, but in fact, you have some work to do yourself. There are over 200 indicators that Google use to rank your website in search results. Most of which can be improved by adding and editing different elements on your website including your meta tags like we mentioned in step 4. How can you find out if your on-page SEO is bad? You can use my free tool to check your SEO Score. Input your website URL and place the keyword you want to rank highly for and hit enter. It will give you a score out of 100 and tell you which areas need your attention. How can you improve your on-page SEO? I would recommend that you focus on one main topic for each page of your website. Everything from the page headings, image file names and internal links will need to be considered if you want strong search engines rankings. 6. Not enough quality content. I honestly believe that high-quality content makes the biggest difference in how well your website performs when it comes ranking highly. Your website needs to have a good amount of content to perform well in search results. I’ve seen this time and time again. People pay £1000s for a brand-new website and then let themselves down with poor-quality content. It's recommended that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. This will give Google enough confidence that the information on that page is somewhat valuable. Any less than that and your website is probably not going to rank well. How to check the word count on the page. You can use this tool to count the number of words on each web page. I would recommend that each page on your website should have at least 300–400 words of content. However, there are no hard and fast rules about this. For instance, most of the pages on my website contain 500–1000 words, and some of my blog posts are over 2000 words long (including this one). I personally find that the longer the content, the more helpful the information. There is an extra SEO argument for more content. The more content = more opportunity to include more keywords. How can you fix it? You can simply edit your existing pages to increase the number of words. You could even pay a writer to produce your content on a regular basis. Prices for a copywriter tend to be around £100–£200 per page depending on the time it takes and the research involved. Here are my four tips to writing better content...

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