SEO is a crucial aspect of online marketing. However, it’s not surprising that even the biggest companies find themselves struggling to rank their websites. To be noticed online, your website needs to rank highly in search engines. Therefore, you need to optimize your website correctly according to the latest trends.
If you’ve been asking yourself, “Why isn’t my website ranking in Google?” Who doesn’t want to have higher rankings in Google but don’t know how? This article tells you exactly why your site isn’t ranking and how to fix it.
Reasons Why Isn’t My Website Ranking in Google…Plus Tips to Fix Them
Ranking Issue 1: Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a problem when you want a search engine to know what pages are about a particular topic, so don’t wonder this question “Why isn’t my website ranking?” This issue is usually caused by having multiple versions of your website indexed by Google. In the case of duplicate content, Google attempts to determine the most “authoritative” page by identifying the best version of the canonical page.
Assuming you have a page named index.html and then another page named index_old.html, the old page might be indexed as canonical. To fix this, make the new version of the site canonical.
With no canonical set, Google indexes this page as if there were no other page versions available. In reality, there are many other versions of this page available, including external links.
Ranking Issue 2: No Social Media Activity
You should be active on major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube if you’re trying to boost your online presence and SEO. All four of the sites are extremely popular platforms. In addition, each site offers analytics that shows.
Social signals tell Google what to pay attention to. In this case, the social media accounts tell Google what web pages get clicked by users. This lets Google know which pages rank highest. These pages then take up the first place on search results.
Ranking Issue 3: You’re Not Utilizing Google My Business
If you aren’t already using Google My Business, it’s time to get started. You are going to miss out on several opportunities if you ignore them. Registering with Google helps boost your site’s rankings, keeps your information fresh and current, and lets them know you want to work together.
Search engines will prioritize your business listing on Google Maps based on the data presented by Google. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you’ve optimized that data as much as possible.
Ranking Issue 4: Inconsistent Content
Content marketing is becoming more prevalent. Blogs and other forms of online content are being produced at a much faster pace than ever before. As such, there’s been a shift in thinking about how often you should post content. Many companies now publish content weekly or even daily. In addition, SEO professionals recommend that web admins focus on optimizing content for both short-term and long-term gains.
Post at least 2 or 3 new blog posts per week. You want to regularly post because it keeps you in front of your prospects and keeps you on their minds for those who already know you. Content always stays relevant even if the subject matter changes. A constant flow of content shows your customers that you’re still in the game.
As long as you continue to generate new content regularly, you’re going to see increased traffic. So you want to make sure you’re publishing fresh content consistently. Don’t wait too long between posts; if you do, Google won’t be likely to crawl your pages often enough for them to count towards SEO.
Ranking Issue 5: No Content
If you find yourself asking, “Why isn’t my site ranking properly?” this might be one of the main causes. Google has been investing heavily into giving more credence to websites with quality content over those without it-and keyword-rich content is one of the best ways to do that.
Ranking Issue 6: Your Website Isn’t Mobile-Friendly
You should optimize the website for mobile viewing as well as desktop viewing. You should also make sure that you’re using responsive web design techniques so that your content displays properly across all devices. That said, if you aren’t offering any content or functionality for mobile users, then your website is useless regardless of whether it looks great on the phone.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check how your website fares.
Ranking Issue 7: You Have an Unindexed Website
We’ve identified the common things that could be causing your site not to appear in search engine visibility results: Pages not indexed by Google, files preventing Google bots from crawling certain areas of your website, or pages that you’d like to rank higher than others because they provide more value. You should check each of these technical issues and try to fix them if possible.
It would help if you also considered adding robots.txt files containing instructions for search engines. In addition, webmasters often add disallowed keywords into URLs to ensure that spiders never crawl them.
Many web admins use noindex meta tags as a method of hiding content from search engines, but they often forget to add them to pages that are intended to be indexed by the Google search engine. Sometimes you may want to remove something from a page—like a product listing, for example—and you’ll want to ensure that noindex meta robots tags aren’t included.
Ranking Issue 8: Your Website Is New
If you want more visibility to your site quickly, try submitting backlinks as soon as possible. This includes links from other reputable websites, forums, blogs, and any other sources. Of course, you should also submit relevant content but avoid spammy or low-quality content that doesn’t add value to your site.
To make sure you get listed as soon as possible, submit a sitemap to help Google understand what’s happening on your website.
As soon as you submit the XML sitemap to the Google Search Console, you’ll see that Google discovers your site quickly. It would help if you now waited a few days before starting to worry about rankings.
If you’re seeing no organic search results, try creating a sitemap. Here’s how:
- Create a new sitemap by clicking on “Sitemaps” under “Search Console” on the Google Search Console. Provide a URL and then click “Add Sitemap.”
- Submit the sitemap using the form provided. To make sure you’re providing the correct data, check the URLs listed on each page of the sitemap. If you aren’t getting any organic search results, there might be something wrong with the sitemap. Try again with another sitemap if you still have technical issues.
If do you get a “404 Not Found” error, most likely, your site is probably missing a robots.txt file, or a disallow directive. Perhaps your website is new and does not yet contain these directives.
Ranking Issue 9: You Have a Slow Website
For your website to do well, you need to ensure that your users have a pleasant experience while navigating the site. To do that, you should load pages quickly and without errors. First, check out the site speed tests done by Google’s page performance team. Then, compare your site to several other sites. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be better informed about what kinds of improvements you need to make to your site.
Your pages must load within 5 seconds or less. If they’re taking more time than that, it means that something is wrong with your server setup. So you need to check what’s causing that bottleneck that causes a high bounce rate so you can solve it ASAP.
Ranking Issue 10: Your Website Is Blocking Search Bots from Crawling Your Web Pages
Most websites have a robots.txt file that tells search engines where you want them to index or not. Search engines can’t access pages that aren’t indexed by Google, so if you block them in your robots.txt files, they won’t appear in search results. For example, say you wanted to avoid getting unnatural links back to your blog because you think they’re spammy. You could add instructions such as “* disallowed” to your robots.txt file. Unfortunately, that means search engines can’t get at any URL starting with *. So instead of showing up in relevant searches, they’d be hidden behind a paywall.
Ranking Issue 11: Your Website Doesn’t Have Enough High-Quality Backlinks
Many factors go into how well your website does in search engines, but backlinks seem to be a powerful ranking factor. Websites with many internal links coming from other sites tend to rank better than ones without those links. Inbound links also mean something to Google’s algorithm. If you have a few dozen links from quality sources, your site should do well. The more quality links you have, the higher your chances of being ranked. Having fewer backlinks means you may need to improve your piece of content and make sure it ranks well.
You can check out these free backlink checkers:
Ranking Issue 12: Your Page Has Low Search Intent
People who want to rank within Google should write content that answers the question asked in the SERPs. And it should be written clearly for humans. For example, try asking yourself a question such as “Why isn’t my website ranking?” and develop a list of target keywords or key phrases related to the topic. Then make sure there’s some real connection to what you’re writing about.
The most popular search query terms within your site are worth examining because they indicate how well you’re doing at communicating your message. These words should also help you refine your content strategy as you improve your messaging.
You should optimize your content for both search engines and human readers. Of course, it will help if you use long-tail keywords so your brand gets seen by visitors. But you also need to include short-tail keywords to help get more traffic from your site. And if you don’t know what those words mean, you may be missing out on many opportunities for traffic.
Ranking Issue 13: Your Website Has Been Penalized, Deindexed, or Sandboxed
Algorithmic penalties can also resolve your burning question ‘Why doesn’t my website show on Google’? Your site isn’t new, and you didn’t add any information about your site by using the robots.txt file. You might temporarily or permanently lose traffic as a manual penalty from Google.
You may have broken Google’s rules if your site uses spammy techniques or other questionable practices. Don’t engage in any shady practices such as buying unnatural links, keyword stuffing, or anything else that Google frowns upon. Even if your other pages are perfect, if you do something shady on one page, you may get caught. Don’t put your website into situations where it could lose rankings.
Here are some things worth noting:
Deindexed: Google completely removes your entire site from any searches you make using their tools.
Penalized: As part of recent Google updates, some URLs were incorrectly indexed. This means that Googlebot was unable to locate any of your web pages.
Sandboxed: When a page has been removed from search rankings, it becomes unavailable to anyone except Googlebot and people accessing through Google.
If you notice that a link on one of your domains points to another domain or vice versa, this will often cause problems in Google’s algorithms and lead to penalties. To prevent this kind of problem, you’ll want to make sure you only link to trusted domains and websites that remain visible to users.
Ranking Issue 14: Your SEO Techniques Are Outdated
Search engine optimization isn’t a fixed process anymore. It would help if you were constantly tweaking things until you achieve the results you want. However, innovations make optimizing your site much easier than ever before. The modern approach will help put your site at the top of the search engine rankings, improving your visibility and increasing traffic.
Ranking Issue 15: The Target Keywords You’re Ranking Is Highly Competitive
Optimization is very vital in improving your rankings. But, you need to make sure that you’re not optimizing your content for competitive terms. Try using long-tail keywords instead. These tend to be less crowded and easier to rank for. You can also use negative keywords and phrases, but make sure that you do not include any terms that you want to avoid ranking for.
A long-tail keyword strategy helps you rank for more competitive keywords without competing directly with other high competing pages. You need to create unique content targeting long-tail keywords and phrases. Long-tail keyword research takes time, but it pays off in the end.
Ranking Issue 16: You Haven’t Added Internal Links
A poor or unclear site structure makes it difficult for users to find what they need. The poor internal linking structure also hurts your ranking possibilities. If you want to make sure your content shows up in the search engine results, then the internal linking structure must be great!
Internal linking is important because it makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. You want your most valuable content to be linked to more frequently, not at random or out of context. Your keywords should appear naturally within the text.
Ranking Issue 17: Your Website Has Poor Navigation
As site content grows, users can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available. So, consider how you want your site visitors to navigate around. For example, if you’re trying to rank well for specific keywords or phrases, it may help make sure that each page within your site clearly states what those keywords or phrases are. That way, it should be easier for search engines to understand what topics a page deals with and thus better categorize it.
Ranking Issue 18: You Are Not Trustworthy Enough
As a result of Google’s new E.A.T., sites were ranked based on the site’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. However, the search engine giant soon realized that most of its top results had been artificially inflated by “link farms” built around low-quality blog posts.
Someone with expertise in the topic should write your articles, and if possible, include external links to high-ranking sources. Of course, you also need to make sure that your profile is up-to-date.
Ranking Issue 19: You Have an Overly Optimized Website
On-page optimization is very important, but you should never put too much emphasis on it. You may end up doing more harm than good if you go overboard. Instead, focus on your high-quality content first, then make sure that everything else follows suit.
If you want more traffic to your blog or website, you should first focus on writing great content quality. Always put your users’ interests ahead of SEO. Also, consider investing in some copywriting images so that your page looks more visually appealing. Increasing the value, you’re providing visitors is always a good idea!
Ranking Issue 20: You’ve Recently Revised Your Permalinks
Google recognizes the importance of page permalinks. However, changing them could affect search engine rankings.
Many old pages on your site will probably need to get those sneaky redirects to new URLs. That’s fine long so long as you ensure that you’re not losing any ranking juice. Also, consider using canonical tags to help Google identify which page should be considered “the” version of each URL.
Ranking Issue 21: You Changed Your Encryption
The good news about getting SSL certificates is that you’ll likely see some improvement in rankings once you’ve got them. The bad news is, this also means that you will experience some dips in rankings until you start seeing improvements.
To mitigate this risk, we suggest using a 301 redirect when switching from HTTP to HTTPS. However, you do not want to use a 302 redirect because the user might think he should return after the redirection.
The good news about getting SSL certificates is that you’ll likely see some improvement in rankings once you’ve got them.
Ranking Issue 22: You Have Too Many Affiliate Links
Google Analytics does not object too much to affiliate links in articles, but they do not want them to be used as a means to sell or promote other products. That makes sense. As a rule of thumb, ensure the terms frequently used in affiliate content you are promoting aren’t something that exists already. For example, you wouldn’t want to create confusion by calling a new product “Ivy League” when what you’re selling is called Ivy League.
To End
A website high on search engine rankings is very important for business growth and development. It can help you get noticed when people look up information about your products or services online. Do you need help improving your SEO status? ITDWebDesign is an SEO company that specializes in web development and SEO services.
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