A few months ago, a business owner rang us one Monday morning, convinced that Google had forgotten their website somehow. The website had been launched just a little while back. The design was great, and everything was working fine. However, whenever he searched for his business on Google, there was no sign of the website. His immediate assumption was that there must be something that was broken somewhere. It wasn’t.
At Devlofox Technologies, we have had many variations of that discussion countless times. It’s never a problem with the website itself. Usually, it’s Google simply not having enough information to know what your website is about. If you have found yourself here reading this post, you are most likely someone who has checked for their website at least once or twice. Or maybe several times. Well, you are not alone at all.
We launched our website a Week Ago. Why Are We Still Not Ranking
This is another thing that confuses a lot of business owners. Just launching a website doesn’t mean that Google already knows about it. First, the search engines need to find it, crawl, analyze, and figure out where this particular website should rank among millions of others. This may happen pretty soon. But sometimes it might take several weeks.
And I totally understand why people may get frustrated. They have invested in a website; they are excited to get some inquiries – and then there is nothing. It may seem unfair, but this is the usual way the process goes. The thing that can help Google to find your website faster is submitting it through Google Search Console. And even then, some patience is required.
A Little Technical Setting May Cause a Huge Problem
We have seen this happen many times. Websites are normally developed on testing servers until they are deployed to the live domain. While developing a website, it is a usual practice to prevent search engines from indexing it. The problem starts if the particular setting is accidentally left turned on after the launch of the website.
Once we met a website that had been online for nearly a month, and people didn’t realize that it had been hidden from Google during development. The business owner thought that Google had penalized him somehow. In reality, this was just a small mistake.
From the outside, everything seemed absolutely okay. The website was loading fine; there was no problem with the contact form; users could browse every single page without any issues. While at the same time Google was basically being instructed not to index the particular website. The tricky part of this is that sometimes business owners don’t see any problems for weeks, since there are absolutely no visible warning signs of that.
Sometimes Google Simply Does Not Understand What Your Website Is About
A lot of companies make it unnecessarily hard for Google. They are describing themselves using professional words that do not resemble anything that their clients type into Google.
Once we reviewed a website of a company selling women’s clothing. On this website, they were constantly using phrases such as “premium fashion excellence”. It did sound pretty good, but nobody was searching for it.
What they really needed were phrases such as “women ethnic wear in Noida”, “party wear dresses near me”, and other stuff like that. Those were two absolutely different discussions. As I mentioned above, Google is relying mostly on context. And if your website does not provide the particular context, you make the job of Google harder.
Your Website Might Be Too Thin
A homepage, an About Us page, and a Contact page may look absolutely fine for a client. However, for Google, it may not be enough. If a website contains only a few hundred words of text, how well can search engines understand what the particular business specializes in? Not too confidently.
Of course, you cannot fill your website with useless paragraphs of text. But you can create some valuable content. Pages dedicated to the services provided by the business owner, FAQ, blogs, and answers to the questions of customers. That is exactly the kind of content that will bring you some traffic eventually. Creating this content is quite a labor-intensive process, especially when you already have a dozen of other tasks on your hands. But it helps.
We Have All Left a Slow Website Before
Let’s be honest. Would you wait for 8 or 10 seconds for a website to load?
Most of us wouldn’t. Large image files, bad hosting, useless plugins, and excess code can all make a website slow. Speed is not the only thing that Google takes into account while ranking, but if your website is not loading fast enough,
people notice it and leave before they even have a chance to see it. A lot of people pay attention to the design of their website, and it is totally understandable. The thing that is overlooked quite often is the performance of a website.
And Here Is Where Most of Business Owners Fall Behind
There is this idea that SEO is something that is finished. Most people believe that it works just like this – you build your website, you add some keywords, you optimize a couple of pages, you check the box, and done.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Websites that consistently rank in Google are not necessarily the most expensive and fancy websites. They just keep improving constantly. New content is added. The old content is updated. Some technical issues are fixed. Meanwhile, the competitors are doing the same thing.
Turning Search Visibility Into Tangible Traffic
Don’t panic if your website doesn’t appear on Google right now. The sites that we have reviewed in Devlofox Technologies usually don’t have any major problems in the background. Instead, they have a bunch of smaller problems working against them. Perhaps Google hasn’t processed that website properly. Or the content doesn’t provide enough context. Or perhaps the targeted phrases are never searched for.
Most of the improvements that we have seen are the result of focusing on the basics and maintaining them. If your website doesn’t appear right now, it doesn’t mean anything terrible went wrong with it. It’s most likely that nobody has taken a close look at the small details affecting its visibility. Fix these details, improve the site, and give it some time. That’s where the progress usually begins.
