Ranking high in Google is a huge piece of the success puzzle these days.
Finding a way to dominate for relevant keywords so that your site shows up more often than your competitors – and higher up in the rankings, too — will help push a flood of targeted traffic to your site, generating the kind of prospects and customers you need to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive business landscape.
At the same time, it can feel like mastering Google in getting your site to show up higher in those search engine rankings is a bit like a dark art. Nobody outside of Google really understands what makes one site jump in the ranks and another crater, though we have a good idea of how to tilt the odds in your favor.
If you have noticed that your site isn’t showing up in the rankings yet the odds are pretty good that the details below are causing the hangup.
Let’s dive right in!
Your Website Might Be Too New
Right out of the gate, the number one reason that your website isn’t showing up in Google right now may simply be because it is still to brand-new.
As fast and as comprehensive as Google indexing spiders and algorithms are they still haven’t yet been able to add new websites to their index instantaneously. It’s going to take a little bit of time (though it shouldn’t take very long) for your site to begin showing up in Google, so if you are running a brand-new platform not a bad idea to wait a couple days to see if Google needs a bit more time to find you.
A great trek to tell if Google has indexed your site yet is to punch the following string into the search giant:
Site:yoursite.com
Replacing “yoursite.com” with your actual web address. If anything shows up you can be sure that Google knows you exist, but if nothing shows up it may take a little longer until Google gets around to indexing you themselves.
You Could Be Blocking Your Site from Google Indexing
Of course, one of the reasons that Google hasn’t indexed your site just yet may come down to the fact that you are (often inadvertently) blocking them from indexing you in the first place.
There is a specific HTML code that can cause your site to be ignored by Google search engine spiders and the indexing process, and that’s the “no index” meta tag – a tag that looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”/>
If that code is found on any of your webpages they won’t be indexed, regardless of whether or not you have created a site map, have submitted your site for indexing, or are using the Google Search Console tools. You need to be sure that your website is free of this code to be indexed properly.
Your SEO Efforts Aren’t Working (Yet)
Of course, another reason that your site isn’t showing up in Google could be because your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts aren’t working the way you expected them to – at least not yet, anyway.
Different search engine optimization strategies can take different amounts of time to work and some of them are far more effective (or ineffective, as the case may be) than others. This is why it’s so important to work with search engine optimization experts to handle the heavy lifting for you – especially in the early stages of your SEO efforts – if you want to see results quickly.
Organic search engine optimization can take a long time to come to fruition, but handling it all on your own (without experience or the know-how that veterans of the SEO world have under their belts already) can cause it to take even longer.
You Haven’t Set Up Google Analytics and Google Search Console
If you’re not familiar with these free tools, here’s a quick breakdown.
Google Analytics measures statistics about your website like sessions, bounce rate time spent on site, what pages they looked at, where they’re from, etc.
Google Search Console (also known as Google Webmaster Tools): It allows you to monitor different aspects of your website like when it was last crawled, any indexing errors, security issues, etc.
Google Search Console also allows you to manually submit sitemaps for crawling. By utilizing these two tools, Google will likely index your website immediately. Remember, the faster that Google Indexes your website, the sooner that you can start improving your SEO and Rankings.
You Haven’t Set Up PPC Campaigns (Yet)
Pay Per Click (PPC) search campaigns can push a flood of targeted traffic to your website faster than maybe anything else. When done correctly they can also help you to get indexed and to grow your organic search engine results, too.
Of course, because you are going to have to pony up some cash and capital to run these kinds of search engine ads a lot of people are hesitant to jump right in. They don’t want to waste any of their hard-earned money on PPC that may not work, and there are plenty of horror stories out there about people handling their own PPC campaigns and wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars just because they weren’t sure of the ins and outs of this platform.
The easiest way to avoid that kind of waste and that kind of setback is to instead invest in the expertise of PPC professionals that know how to squeeze every drop of leverage out of this traffic source for you. The right PPC experts will be able to stretch your budget as far as possible while getting you real results in a hurry!