Why Isn’t My Website Ranking on Google?

Intro

Let's be brutally honest. Ranking on Google's coveted first page is the lifeblood of any website. If you're languishing on page two or further down, there's virtually no hope of being found. For businesses, it's a huge priority to gain rankings on Google as part of their digital marketing strategy. After all, according to Oberlo, Google dominates the search engines with a massive 91.9% share.

Many online business owners are often mystified as to why their brand-new websites are unable to score a hit. They have allocated budgets for advertising, and implemented SEO, and are still failing to get noticed. We often hear agencies say SEO takes between three and six months but let’s be real, there is no magic number when it comes to seeing results. Many factors come into play. Therefore, it's vital to take direct action. Here are a few of the strategies that can help your website take center stage.

Are Search Engine Rankings Important?

Yes, rankings on a search engine are important. The closer to you the top 3 positions mean more eyeballs on your page. If you have a well-optimised, conversion-friendly site alongside a great product/service, then you are in for a treat. You will be seeing more customers and higher revenue. But how does Google decide what website ranks first?

Search engines such as Google operate bots that crawl through the internet's content. As the bots scour billions of pages, they are on the alert for details such as URLs and code. They use these to compile an index or directory that becomes active every time someone searches.

According to Siteefy, Google processes up to eight billion searches every single day. This amounts to around 95,000 requests per second. Results are delivered in a second or two, making it a necessity to ensure your website pages are bot friendly. Otherwise, your website could easily be overlooked amongst such opposition.

Reasons You're Not Ranking

As mentioned earlier many factors come into play when trying to get pages on your website to rank well. Some of these include helpful content, on-page optimisation, website speed, backlinks, good navigation and plenty of other factors.

However, there are also reasons why your website wouldn’t be ranking. We have discussed some below that should be avoided by anybody looking to increase their rankings.

Website Speed Is Slow

Ever get frustrated with a web page that won't load? According to data from Digital.com, 53% of visitors leave a site if it hasn't loaded in after six seconds. Even worse, approximately 50% of customers abandon their shopping carts if pages are too slow to appear. Entrusting your site to a reliable host and server is a crucial factor, but what can be done about ensuring your website loads fast?

An effective solution is to check out the health of your website with a tool such as Ranktracker’s website audit tool. It can check out the effectiveness of hundreds of web pages in just a few seconds and will give a list of issues that need to be improved. It also highlights any issues that may be affecting speed. These could include robot txt issues, sitemap issues, broken links etc, that may be confusing the search engines. Any difficulties are installed on an easy-to-navigate dashboard, allowing you to sort them on a priority basis.

Content Doesn’t Have Trust

The internet is an amazing place to be, but some sites simply appear untrustworthy. Analysis from Kinesis shows that visitors take just 0.05 seconds to evaluate your website. This is around the same time as it takes to blink. Up to 94% of visitors judge by appearances.

If your website looks unappealing and is poorly designed, visitors quickly leave and look elsewhere. Security is a major influence, particularly for commercial websites. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate that awards the prefix https, and not HTTP, is a vital reassurance for potential customers. It shows that it should be a safe place to visit.

Targeting the Wrong Keywords

It's almost impossible to visualize the amount of information on the web. Your website is like a grain of sand in a desert. To help the search engines locate your website, they need clear directions. That's where the importance of keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) come in. They narrow the field by targeting specific data, information or subjects. In many instances, keywords can be so effective that they enable small, niche sites to perform well.

Ensure your website content is clearly defined and easy to understand. One tip is to imagine you are explaining the words to a child. Straying from the main subject matter creates confusion for search engines and visitors. As we learned from Google updates such as the Helpful Content update, the information on the page is far more valuable than how much content is on the page. The searcher needs to feel like their query has been answered/resolved.

Keywords are often at the mercy of current search trends, particularly in marketing. To keep your content relevant, SEO experts recommend a keyword tool. It has access to a massive database that indicates a word's popularity amongst the billions of daily searches. When investing in advertising, it's vital to target the keywords that should give your website optimal exposure. A tool will inform you of a terms search volume per month, difficulty to rank on Google, its trends, CPC etc. It’s important to understand and research the intent of a keyword too.

For example, long tail keywords might be the better search term to target. The search is generally lower but the intent is more accurate. For example, ranking for the keyword ‘Travis Scott Air Jordan 1’ instead of the term ‘trainers’. The searcher knows what they want therefore the intent of the long tail keyword is better, increasing the chances of a conversion.

Not Publishing Often Enough

Everyone loves searching for the latest news or products, yet there's a surprising number of dormant websites out on the web. According to PCMag, only 200 million websites out of 1.7 billion are active, meaning that 94.4% are dormant. Demonstrate your website is alive and well by regularly posting new content every two or three days. However, your new posts must be of high quality as bots love to locate information that adds real value to the web.

Not Optimizing Old Pages and Posts

Information on your website that was published ages ago may no longer be relevant. For instance, it could talk about products that are no longer available. Taking the time to revisit these posts and rewrite part of them enables you to include details such as new scientific discoveries. Be warned, rewriting can be time-consuming, so it could be to your advantage to be selective over which posts are sure to please the search engines the most.

Website has Poor Navigation

There's nothing more irritating than trying to find your way around a complicated website. People are looking for answers and will quickly bounce if they can't find what they want in a few seconds. Spend time reassessing your site. Check if the menu is easy to understand and leads to where it makes the most sense. An uncluttered design can help simplify the site's appearance, enabling visitors to realize you can help with their search.

Market is too Competitive

One of the most lucrative areas of commerce is sneakers. According to Statista, the sneakers industry worldwide is worth approximately $75.77 billion and is set to rise by 5.31% in the next year. If your site should sell sneakers, you face a huge amount of competition. The solution? You need to be highly creative, determined and prepared to take bold action.

Ensure your website is attractive and packed with useful information such as video clips demonstrating how wonderful your products are. Ensure that you are ranking for the correct terms. The example we used about the trainers earlier applies here. The keyword difficulty (KD) will help determine the type of keywords you should target too. This number depends on how competitive the market is. You can use the keyword finder tool to see the KD.

You have No-Index Tag on the Page

When creating a website, professional designers often place a no-index tag on specific pages to simplify construction. Occasionally, they can be overlooked during the final stage, preventing bots to index the pages. Check out your content and remove them from important pages that feature products, services or vital information. You can leave no-index tags on pages such as downloads and ‘thank you’.

You have No Authoritative Backlinks

Constructing a network of backlinks is essential in widening your presence on the web. Backlinks are simply links from another website. Linking from well-respected sites helps raise your profile, and makes you appear more knowledgeable and trustworthy.

It takes considerable time to establish a rapport with other sites, but it can eventually bring great results. Search engines will inevitably locate your site through those they already know to exist.

The most effective method to check your backlink profile is to use the Ranktracker backlink tool. It has a growing database of 2.7 trillion links and can even assess those used by your rivals. The tool can provide the best insight into meaningful links for your site through detailed analysis.

New Algorithm Update by Google

According to WebTribunal.net, Google releases an algorithm update 500 and 600 times yearly. This could be around once or twice a day. They help keep Google's search engines up to date in its ranking system, but they can prevent the bots from finding your site. An analytics tool can highlight if your site's visitor rate falls whenever it coincides with an algorithm update.

Conclusion

Preventing your website from slowly falling down the rankings needs constant attention to prevent dormancy from setting in. You can complete many tasks to ensure your site is vibrant, well-informed and relevant to your chosen market. You can make the entire process so much easier by investing in reliable assistance such as the Ranktracker SEO tool. It uses worldwide data, sophisticated analytics, trends and much more. Increase your website’s ranking through Ranktracker.