If you are doing an online business it is almost critical today, to rank on the first page of Google search results.
But why only the first page?
What if you make it to the second page, will people not find you?
According to Moz, the first page of Google gets 71% of the the search traffic; it even goes up to 92% in certain cases.
You might think the second page results would be close.
But, you will be astonished if I tell you that second page results capture below 6% of website clicks.
The words that you use to search anything on Google are called keywords. You very well know that for any given keyword, there are millions of different websites trying to show up on the first page of Google.
But only 10 of them will succeed in making it to the first page.
It would be frustrating if your website does not show up on the 1st page, or even 2nd page of Search Results. after putting in so much of SEO effort, time and money.
Reasons you are not ranking on Google
Let us discuss the most common mistakes that people make while optimizing their website for search engines, and how to fix them.
- Google does not know about your website
- Your website has broken links
- The content is not optimized
- Your website has duplicate content
- The website is not mobile friendly
- Meta tags not optimized
- Your website does not have good content
- The website takes a long time to load
- Your website is missing on Social media
- You don’t have backlinks to your Website
Let us discuss them one by one.
1. Google does not know about your website
First of all, you need to assess, does Google know about your website? Because, Google will rank your website only if it knows that your website exists.
You can find out by using the following prefix in a Google search site: yoursite.com
You have to enter the domain name without the the www, dot and the slash. If your site appears in the search results it’s fine. This means your website has been indexed. You will find all your web pages listed on this page. But if it is not showing up it is a matter of concern.
You have made a wonderful website. Beautiful banners going in from left to right, you’ve got a products carousel to catch attention, but after doing all this, if Google does not know that your website exists; how do you expect it to index your website.
One way of Google knowing your website is with a hyperlink from another website, which is indexed by Google. That way, when Google indexes that website, or crawls that website, it will find you and include your website in its database. But, if your website is a standalone, with no incoming hyperlinks from the internet world, there is no way Google can find it or index it.
So the next way is you tell Google that this is my website, please add it to your index. You need to have a Google account and you will use Google Search Console to add your website for indexing.
There is one more thing that you need before you proceed to Google search console and that is a sitemap of your website. Depending on what platform you have build your website with, you can find plenty of plugins or tools that will help construct a sitemap for your website. Keep this site map handy so that we do not waste time on Google search console.
2. Your website has broken links.
Does your website have any broken links?
You would have come across Error 404 Page not Found, or Image Missing or 500 Internal Server Error many a time while browsing. The Web Server prompts with these error codes to indicate some malfunction. Everything on the World Wide Web is well documented and you can identify the problem from the error code.
4xx are Client Errors
5xx are Server Errors
A 404 Page not found means that the user is able to communicate with the server, but the server is unable to find the requested file or resource. It could be because of a mis-spelt URL being entered in the address bar, or while linking to a new page, the page URL was not written correctly, resulting in a page not found error.
Similarly, if you have linked to an image, say myimage.jpg and the file you have uploaded to the server is my-image.jpg or myimage.jpeg or Myimage.JPG, it will result in a Image Missing error.
Google Search Console can tell about these errors on your website. You need to fix these broken links and other such errors before you publish your page. This will make your Google rank drastically better.
3. The content is not Optimized
The next thing you have to watch out for is content optimization. This is related to the keywords I spoke to you.
First of all, make a list of the keywords for which you want your website to rank on Google.
Now, using a Keyword Research Tool, you can look for suggestions for similar keywords. All these suggestions may not be useful to you immediately, but if you analyze carefully, you can extract tons of useful information. In addition to suggestions on keywords, the Keyword Research Tool will also give you
- Search Volumes (monthly basis)
- Competition (High, Medium, Low) and
- Keyword pricing for PPC (Pay per Click).
Use this information to target the keywords for which you want to rank, and where you can rank and develop your content accordingly.
Evaluate the competition for each of these keywords. Most keyword suggestion tools will give you additional keywords or key phrases with their search volumes and the competition.
Let’s say you make wall papers. Google Adwords shows the search volume between 1-10 million per month, and competition as HIGH. I would not suggest you target this keyword in your SEO planning, as the amount of effort and time required can discourage even seasoned marketers.
However, if you scroll down in the list, there are keywords like black wall papers, or Christmas wall papers, or love wall papers. The competition for these is LOW, and the search volume is respectable. You will rank faster, and with relatively less effort on these key phrases.
While creating content, try to focus on one keyword or a key phrase on one page. Make different pages for different keywords.
4. Your website has duplicate content.
Throughout your website, keep only original content.
Avoid any duplicate content.
Sometimes, when you hire a content writer, he may pass you off a piece of content, as original, but which has actually been copied from some other website. You may not be able to verify that, but Google can! And in fact, you too can. If Google finds out first, that the content on your website is copied from elsewhere, it will penalize both the web pages, yours as well as the source. Hence, it is better to ensure that the content on your website is not plagiarized before publishing it.
There are a number of tools available on the internet that check and let you know if the content is original or plagiarised. One such website is Duplichecker.
Simply paste the URL of your web page, or copy and paste the contents of the page page on Duplichecker, and it will flash the results within a few seconds.
You can instantly know what percentage of content is original, and what percentage is plagiarized; Which piece of content has been spotted elsewhere on the Internet.
There is however, a way out of this situation. There exists an HTML element, called the canonical tag. If you have to use identical or partially identical content, place this in the <head> section of each such page <link href=”https://original-page-url” rel=”canonical”>.
5. Your website is not mobile friendly
Most internet users use some sort of mobile device to access the internet web pages. Google has started considering the mobile friendliness of your website as a key factor in ranking.
You can check whether your website is mobile friendly in Google Chrome. Click on the 3 vertical dots in the upper right corner, —> More Tools —> Developer Tools.
Press Ctrl+Shift+M and you can view the website in different screen modes. If your website renders perfectly on different screen sizes we call it responsive, or mobile-friendly. Making a website responsive is not so much of a daunting task in itself. If you are using WordPress or Joomla, there are a host of themes available which are responsive. Use them directly instead of trying to make the existing theme responsive.
6. Meta tags not optimized.
Search engines use metadata to know about your website.
Meta data are tags placed in the <head> section of your webpage; and each webpage can have its own set of meta tags. Some very important meta tags include the title tag, description tag and the keyword tag. These tags can be optimized to describe the content of that page.
The information that appears in search results is usually from meta tags. Not all meta data tags are important for a web page. The keyword meta tag is no longer used by Google or any of the search engines to rank pages.
These days, the title tag plays a dominant role, and also affects your search engine rankings. Your title tag should always include the keywords you want to rank for. You might have come across instructions about the length of title tag. There is no exact limit, but as a suggestion, title tag should be under 60 characters; this way it displays properly on most devices.
Description tags <meta name=”description” content=”This is an example of a meta description.”> can improve your click rates, if written effectively. Include a call to action in the description tag. I have even come across some websites using a phone number in the meta description to make it easier for people to reach you.
7. Your website does not have good Content
When we say good content, we allude to the quantity as well as quality. We have discussed duplicate or copied content above. This section is about content being relevant to the title and keyword and how its useful to users.
Search engines want content, for their users to feel satisfied. So if you want your web pages to rank better on Google and other search engines, your website should have a lot of relevant content. Relevant to the keywords that you are targeting.
These days I see websites which are very beautiful to look at, but when I go to the page source, I find there is hardly any content behind it. Scrolling banners and special effects rock! But, all these special effects add a lot of script to your webpage.
There is this text to code ratio that you need to watch. This is the ratio of number of characters of visual text to the number of characters as seen in the Page Source. A good text to code ratio for webpages is anything between 25 to 70%. The more the better. This emphasizes the need of knowing HTML or scripting code which results in a clean code.
When you add an image to your webpage, you should inform the search engine what the image is about. You do this by using an alt image tag. The alt tag is the piece of text which appears on the browser when the image fails to load. Something like <img src=”danceparty.jpg” alt=”My team dancing at New Year’s eve”>. Ideally, the alt tags should be descriptive to such an extent that if someone is using a text-to-speech tool to read the page, he should get the complete picture.
8. Your website takes a long time to load.
Industry research has shown that users prefer websites that load faster. So, since 2018, Google has included page speeds as a ranking factor for websites.
Though there are many tools on the internet using which you can assess the download speed of your webpage, I suggest using the Page Speed Insights from Google developer tools. Simply enter your URL and it will give you the download time on mobile as well as desktop browsers.
Though there could be many factors affecting the download speed but it will give you a fair average. Page Speed Insights also gives suggestions on what is wrong and where.
One thing is for sure; if your webpage takes more time to download, people will abandon your website and move on to your competitor on a different website.
If you work on reducing page download speeds, research has shown that page abandonment reduces by almost 20% in most cases, and your Google rank gets better.
9. You don’t have backlinks to your website
Back links are hyperlinks to your web pages from other websites. A lot of emphasis is placed on back-links in SEO and Google rankings.
When you have other websites linking to your webpage, Google takes it as a positive factor to rank your web page higher. This indirectly conveys that your page has some relevant information, which users on other websites, consider worthy enough to share with others. And Google will give you a plus for this back-link.
So, when a lot of websites link back to your webpage, your Google ranking improves.
You can use Google Search Console to give you a count of backlinks to your website. It gives an extensive analysis of the backlinks.
10. Your website is missing on Social Media
If you are not on social media you are missing a lot of action. I understand that as a businessman, you cannot keep up with the demands of maintaining presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Presence on social media is a good way to generate traffic to your website and also a way of generating back links.
Look at it this way, most people are hooked on to their mobiles at least 60% of their time. Try to identify your target audience, and also the Social Media Platform they use extensively. Be there. Set up profiles for your business and share links to new products and new posts on your website.
There is one more thing that you need to keep in mind which effect ranking of your web page and that is how old it is .
A study has shown that the average age for the first 10 results on the Google search results is 680 days. That is almost 2 years. Therefore, even if you have rectified most of the problems above and your website is still not ranking, it could be because of its age.
Give it sometime.
Patience has its own results.
The only thing that can beat the age criteria is drastically superlative content. with content you can beat even the age factor of the web pages.
One more thing you should do is register your business with Google My Business. It’s easy and it’s free; and it can actually help you rank better. I am sure you have a Google account. You will always need one for Google Search Console or keyword planner, for Google Tag Manager. So, if you register with Google My Business, it gives Google a positive sign that you care about ranking your website. Registering on Google My Business requires very little time or effort but it will help you rank the easy way.