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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
You Are in a Very Competitive SEO Space
If there’s a lot of competition for the keywords you are trying to rank for – especially if you’re shooting for global keywords as opposed to hyper targeted, longtail, local keywords – the chances are your site isn’t going to pop right to the top of the ranks anytime soon.
In the old days of Google (15 years ago or so) anybody could basically throw a webpage up, add a couple of links to it from another site that they owned, and absolutely dominate search engine optimization.
Today nothing could be further from the truth.
Huge websites backed by even bigger companies with almost bottomless budgets aren’t afraid to pump mounds of money into search engine optimization these days. Especially for highly lucrative keywords that are getting millions of searches every day.
This is why keyword research is such a big piece of the puzzle.
You want to be sure that your first going lucrative keywords. But you also need to make sure that you stand a good chance of ranking highly for the keywords you are going after, too.
There’s not a lot of value in being on page 3 of a super lucrative keyword when you don’t have the budget, time, or the energy to get any higher than that.
Your Website was removed from Google
This is a reason your site isn’t showing up that rarely gets talked about.
Believe it or not, though, Google is pretty aggressive when it comes to “pruning” sites from their search engine results.
They may ban you temporarily (or permanently) for any different number of reasons, with or without warning, and sometimes do so out of the clear blue sky.
Changes to the algorithm can reshuffle search engine results completely (just look up the devastation caused by the Panda and Penguin updates to the Google search engine results). You might run afoul of Google’s “code of conduct”, may promote content they don’t want to promote themselves, or they may simply accidentally kick you out of the Google sandbox when they meant to punish someone else.
This is something that you have to investigate yourself. You’ll usually receive a notification in your Google Webmaster Tools about the reason that you were shuffled off of the Google stage (though it might take a couple days after you’ve been kicked out).
Usually these notifications will tell you that you’ve been de-indexed (essentially banned from Google), penalized (not down a page or two in the listings for a variety of reasons), or “sandboxed” – basically shadow banned where you just aren’t getting the kind of traffic you used to at the same search engine position.
In the event of being removed from Google you’ll have to reach out to them directly to see how you can get back into compliance. You may or may not get the green light from this technology giant, though.
If you do, make sure that you bring your site back into compliance ASAP.
If you don’t, it’s time to get to work building a new website that is fully compliant just as soon as you’re able to.
Best of luck going forward!
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