Why Your Website Isn’t Showing Up On Google & How To Fix It

Who wouldn’t want to show up on Google on the first page for their business?! Search engine optimization is essential for those wanting to grow their brand online! I help entrepreneurs optimize their website & content to rank higher in search engines and increase organic searches. You don’t magically start appearing in search results just by having a website. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure you start showing up on result pages. Therefore, here are some reasons why you might not be showing up, and how to fix it.

How To Improve your Google Ranking

1. You Just Launched Your Website

Many times, I launch a client’s website and there’s confusion on why they can’t find themselves on Google days later. If you’re trying to find yourself and you just launched your website – Google simply hasn’t indexed your website yet. Therefore, it can take a few weeks to a few months.

Firstly, you should check if you’re being indexed is to search site:”yourdomain”.com in Google. If Google knows your site exists, you’ll see a list of results for your website. If you don’t see any, you should get started with the following step.

2. Your Site isn’t Being Indexed Properly on Google

If you want your site to show up in the search results at all, then it needs to be indexed. Many people aren’t aware of the steps you need to take to start showing up! So if you followed the step above and realize you’re not being index, a fast way is to submit a sitemap in Google Search Console.

If you haven’t already, create a free Google Search Console account and follow their steps to add your website. Once your account has been created, head over to “Sitemaps” on the left side menu and submit your sitemap URL “yourdomainname.sitemap.xml”.

Sitemaps allow Google to index all of your website pages and fastens the process of showing up. After that, you can also inspect a page URL on the top to “Request Indexing” if it’s not showing up on Google yet. I do this often when I add new pages to my website! If it shows a reason for why the page is not being indexed, investigate to fix the issue.

3. You Need to Fix your Keyword Strategy

Have you inputted important keywords in your meta titles and descriptions for every page? Are you being very specific?

Know your audience to understand the best keywords for your website & try to make them “long tail” keywords that are 2-4 keyword phrases. For instance – “photography” alone can refer to any type of photography. What is your specialty? Weddings, newborns, products? To optimize your website for the right visitors, it’s important to be as specific as possible. I like to use Google AdWords & Google Trends to search volume and traffic for keywords I am considering for myself & for clients. Remove any keywords from your list that have too little or way too much search volume.

If your keyword market is competitive, you’ll have a hard time ranking at the beginning.

4. Your Website Content/Design Needs Work

Google and other search engines will only want to rank sites that know will satisfy people’s inquiries. They take many elements into consideration, from website copy/images, responsive design, page speed and overall user experience.

Having a simple homepage and services page is not enough for you to show up on the 1st page of Google Search Results. As a result, you really need to put in a lot of work to ensure your website is providing great content that Google will want to show. The more pages to index, the better. For instance, try writing some blog posts and this will help your website look as if it provides a ton of great content.

Google and other search engines will not even consider your website to be optimized if it’s not mobile-friendly or if it has a low page speed. You can check your page speed on sites like GTMetrix.

Still Can’t Find The Issue?

It might be that your website has been penalized by Google if it doesn’t meet their guidelines. You can check on your Google Search Console account if there are penalty alerts or issues.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO ranking or update your website design, I’m always here to help! I offer SEO service which includes keyword research, meta page titles & descriptions for every page, installing all proper tools needed, increasing your page speed, submitting a sitemap to Google, compressing & re-naming all images for better optimization. You can view all of my website design services right here or explore my best-selling website SEO guide for only $29.