Even if your website has a top-notch design and fully optimized pages, it’s useless if nobody can find your website. It’s a frustrating experience for website owners when their site fails to appear on Google’s search results.
At WSI Web Enhancers, our digital marketing agency in Albuquerque can analyze your website to find opportunities to optimize it for Google search results. Doing so helps websites climb search engine rankings, helping your website become visible to more of your target audience.
Below, we’ll explain common reasons why your site isn’t showing up in Google’s search results and the steps you can take to fix it.
Why won’t my website appear on Google when I search for it?
There are a few reasons why your website isn’t appearing in Google’s search results. Below, we’ve listed the most common causes and how to fix them.
Your Website Isn’t Indexed
It’s essential to ensure that Google has indexed your website. Indexing refers to when search engines, such as Google, store and organize web pages they have crawled in their database, also known as the index. Google’s database can be compared to an extensive library, and your website is a book. It must be accurately cataloged before it can go into the library.
Ensuring your site can be crawled and indexed is crucial as it determines whether your website’s pages will appear in search engine results when users perform relevant queries.
How To Fix It
Before indexing can occur, search engines need to crawl your website. Crawling is the process of search engine bots exploring your web pages to gather information about their content and structure.
Search engines may need more time to crawl and verify your site’s content and structure if your site is relatively new. However, not getting indexed is sometimes a technical problem and not an issue of slow processing time.
To help Google crawl your web pages, ensure your website is accessible to search engine bots and doesn’t block them through robots.txt or other means. You can access this text file by adding “ /robots.txt” to the end of your root domain to see what pages you’ve allowed crawlers on.
You should also create a sitemap. A sitemap is a file that lists all the essential pages on your website, making it easier for search engine crawlers to discover and index your content. Submit your sitemap to search engines, such as Google Search Console, to help them understand the structure of your site.
Keep an eye on the index coverage report in Google Search Console to identify any indexing issues or errors and take appropriate actions to resolve them.
Your Website Has Google Penalties
Your site may have received penalties from Google for violating their guidelines, such as using black-hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This can significantly impact your site’s visibility on search results.
Black hat SEO refers to unethical practices that manipulate search engine rankings and improve a website’s visibility in search results.
Some examples of these techniques are keyword stuffing and backlink buying. Keyword stuffing is when you overload web pages with excessive keywords to manipulate search rankings. Buying backlinks is acquiring links from unrelated or low-quality websites to artificially boost your site’s authority.
Black hat SEO techniques are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in search engine algorithms. They can lead to penalties or even the complete removal of a website from search engine results.
How To Fix It
First, you should do a thorough website audit to determine which pages have been flagged by Google and avoid black-hat SEO techniques that may lead to penalties. Our digital marketing company can help you determine if your SEO methods follow best practices.
Once you identify the issue, take corrective actions to fix the problem on your website. This may involve removing unnatural links, improving the quality and relevance of your content, and resolving any other issues.
After you have fixed the issues, you can submit a reconsideration request through Google Search Console. In your request, explain the steps taken to rectify the problems and provide evidence of your efforts to comply with Google’s guidelines.
After making the necessary changes, monitor your website’s performance and rankings. Algorithmic penalties may take time to be lifted as Google updates its algorithms. Be patient and continue to focus on providing valuable content and following SEO best practices.
Prevention is always better than the cure. To avoid Google penalties in the future, follow Google’s Essential Guidelines, focus on providing high-quality content, and avoid any black hat SEO practices that can lead to penalties.
Your Website Isn’t Optimized
If your website lacks proper SEO, you may not meet Google’s ranking criteria to rank high enough for you to see your website. SEO involves various technical and creative processes to make your content recognizable by search engines.
How To Fix It
Below are best practices and techniques to optimize your site for SEO:
- Implement relevant keywords
- Create high-quality content
- Optimize website elements
- Improve user experience
The world of SEO is vast and is an ever-evolving field. These are just a few ways to utilize SEO to rank higher in search engines and increase your visibility. Our expert SEO services can help improve your organic traffic and monitor your website’s performance using our various SEO techniques.
Your Website Isn’t Relevant
Low-quality content that lacks relevance and doesn’t match users’ search intent may cause your website to disappear from search results. This negatively affects your site’s chances of ranking well on Google.
For example, if a user searches for “quick kale recipes” to find a recipe that can be prepared quickly, but the result they click on requires over an hour of cooking time, it doesn’t match their search intent.
In this case, the user may return to the search results to find a different recipe that aligns better with their goal of finding a quick and easy recipe.
How To Fix It
Ensure that your website has high-quality, valuable content that is transparent in what your business offers and advertises. Search engines prioritize indexing pages with relevant and original content that provides value to users.
Additionally, if your website doesn’t incorporate relevant keywords that users commonly search for, Google may not understand your content’s context and rank it lower in search results for queries you want to rank higher for. The keywords you’re ranking for should match what you offer.
Our Digital Marketing Agency in Albuquerque Can Help Your Website Appear in Search Results
At WSI Web Enhancers, we ensure your site appears in search results and can help your site rank higher than your competitors. We can continuously monitor your website’s performance to improve your visibility and drive more traffic to your business.
Contact our digital marketing agency in Albuquerque today to make your website visible to Google’s users!
Jukka founded WSI Web Enhancers in 2012. His progressive and pioneering SEO approaches help businesses increase traffic while improving conversion rates. As an accomplished digital marketing authority, he spins effective web design, SEO, and social media engagement into winning strategies for local and national companies.
