12 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Being Found On Google

Your website doesn’t show up on Google. What is the problem? Here are the top reasons why your website is not being found or showing up in Google searches.

Why Doesn’t My Website Show Up On Google?

1. Your Website Is Not Indexed On Google.
2. Your Website Is Not Optimized For Google.
3. The keyword that you want to rank is too competitive.
4. You don’t have enough good backlinks to your website.
5. Your Website Lacks Industry Authority
6. Your Website Has A Google Penalty
7. Your Website Content Does Not Provide Users With Valuable Information (Lack of Original Content & Duplicate Content)
8. Your Website Code Is Preventing Google From Indexing Your Website With Robots.txt Set To Noindex
9. Your Site Doesn’t Deliver A Positive User Experience (UX)
10. Your competition has a better website and has hired an SEO agency
11. Your website does not have a good internal link structure.
12. The website page speed or load time is too slow.

1. Your Website Is Not Indexed On Google.

One of the number one issues with sites not showing up on Google is that they are not indexed in the Google database. Google crawls the web analyzing pages for meaning and content. When the Google Crawler (or Googlebot) visits webpages, they store the pages in the Google Index. If the businesses website has followed Google’s webmaster guidelines, the page can appear in Google search results. If your website has not been crawled and indexed by Google, it will never show up in Google search results.

How to ensure that your website is indexed by Google.

Here are a few tips for making sure that a web page gets crawled and indexed by Google.

• Add an XML sitemap to your site and submit this sitemap through the Google Search Console.
• Add a link to the page you wanted to be indexed on the home page of your website. A link on the home page shows Google that a page is important and that it should be indexed.
• Add several links to this page from other site pages. More internal links from other site pages will show Google that a page has value and should be indexed.
• Acquire links from other web pages that point to this page. When Google finds these links to your webpage, it will follow the link and crawl your site page.
• Other steps to index a webpage quickly on Google are to create a press release with a link in it to the page you want to be indexed, add a link to the page within a YouTube video description, or add several links to this page on Twitter or Facebook. Social media signals, both the links from these social platforms and the potential traffic, will increase the chances of the webpage being indexed quickly.

2. Your Website Is Not Optimized For Google

Is your website not showing up in Google for a specific keyword? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is based on making edits to a web page to make the structure, content, and images ideal for Google to crawl and index.  Google looks for high-quality content and relevance to determine if a web page should rank for a particular keyword. Without SEO and a digital marketing campaign, your webpage, most likely, would not show up for a keyword search on Google or have a substantial web presence.

There are a lot of factors that go into ranking a web page on search engines, but understanding how Google ranks web pages, acquiring backlinks, organic ranking and creating keyword-targeted content is a great place to start. Hiring an SEO agency will keep your website showing up on Google for the long term.

3. The keyword that you want to rank is too competitive.

Highly-competitive keywords can be very hard to rank. Most SEO agencies charge $2000 a month for increasing site rankings and for competitive terms that generate a lot of traffic and sales, this cost can increase to $20,000 a month.

Have you completed keyword research and targeted words that fit your budget and that your website is built for? Most site owners have an unrealistic idea of what it costs and the effort needed to rank a web page for a very competitive keyword. If your keyword is too competitive, it will require more time, energy, and money to appear in a Google search result.

4. You don’t have enough good backlinks to your website

Backlinks are inbound links from another related and reliable online source. Good backlinks will be from trusted sites that are viewed as industry experts or authorities by Google. The stronger and higher the quality of backlinks, the better the site will rank on searches. Links from United States websites boost traffic and website authority.

5. Your Website Lacks Industry Authority

Your expertise does matter when it comes to being a leading online authority in your niche. You want customers to view you as an expert and trust that you have solutions to their problems. High-quality articles, blog posts, and images are steps to give you more credibility.

Incoming links are an authority signal also. The better the source of the link, the more value it has. Google also puts each webpage into a category and each page is given a Confidence Score for how well Google trusts that it fits into that category. The higher the confidence score, the more Google trusts a webpage. With trust comes ranking and traffic. Building a high Category Confidence Score is the best way to build site authority and boost search engine rankings.

6. Your Website Has A Google Penalty

Be aware that search engine crawlers are smart. Google often penalizes web pages that do not adhere to their quality guidelines. These penalties can consist of huge ranking drops, traffic reduction or even completely de-indexing a page from the Google database.

It is a good idea to check your website with resources for checking penalties every month by logging on to Google Search Console and checking Google analytics for traffic statistics. Google Search Console will show if a website received any penalties.  Match this data with the dates of Google’s latest algorithm update.

Take this opportunity to ensure your privacy policy, terms of service, and service pages match the quality guidelines.

7. Your Website Content Does Not Provide Users With Valuable Information (Lack of Original Content & Duplicate Content)

Content is king. But original content is a lot more valuable. Duplicate content means content that appears on other web pages on the same site or pages on another website. Original content is important for proper indexing and Google ranking.  Oftentimes, a website will contain many similar pages that target the same keyword or similar keywords. If the content is too similar, Google will only index one page and ignore the other pages. They simply don’t provide a lot of value to visitors.

Thin content penalties arise from sites with very little helpful content. Webpage content should always provide users with something valuable and pages with minimal content are often hit with a ‘thin content’ penalty. As a rule of thumb, scan your website and look for any page that has under 350 – 400 words of content. Pages with minimal content length are at risk of being hit with a thin content penalty.

8. Your Website Code Is Preventing Google From Indexing Your Website With Robots.txt Set To Noindex

Many websites block Google from indexing specific pages that are not available to the public.  Websites that are under construction or that are in the process of being built are frequently blocked by Google until they are ready to go live. Blocking sites can be done through a file called Robots.txt or through a tag in a site’s metadata. If your webpage is not indexed or showing up in Google, have your web designer check your site to make sure that your whole site is not being blocked. Not being found could simply be an error in the meta tag and robots.txt file that needs editing. Google Search Central provides documentation and instructions on how to resolve this issue.

For WordPress websites, go to the Settings tab, click on the Reading section, and at the bottom of the page make sure that the Search engine visibility box is unchecked. Most web designers check this while the webpage is being built and it is not uncommon for them to forget to uncheck this box when the project is complete. This is often the biggest reason why websites are not indexed by Google.

9. Your Site Doesn’t Deliver A Positive User Experience (UX)

A positive user experience should be the end goal of any website. Once a searcher lands on your homepage, you want to keep them as long as possible to build a relationship and gain their business. Key features and functions are necessary to create the user experience you want: easy navigation, the ability to interact or connect, see examples of work, and explain services.

A positive user experience is tracked by Google. As an example, a high bounce rate signals visitors leaving a page quickly because they did not find what they wanted on the page.  That is a poor user experience. Positive user experiences can include users spending a long time on a page, clicking on a contact button, scrolling and reading to the bottom of the page, or clicking on the ‘Buy’ button or link to purchase a product. These are signals that the searcher’s Google query at the start of their journey was fulfilled. This is a sign that the web page contained the information that a site visitor was looking for.

An expert SEO agency can deliver a positive User Experience and boost sales online.

10. Your competition has a better website and has hired an SEO agency

When it comes to showing up on Google, the pages with the best game win. SEO basics can be mastered with a strategic domain name, content marketing, and clever word and phrase usage, the average person is at a disadvantage when it comes to analyzing data to decide how to best optimize a web page, what content to publish and how to create more inbound links.

Having a local SEO agency worry about the hundreds of pieces of data and every little detail or fact so you can focus on your brand or image is worth the cost. Seeking advice from SEO services professionals to develop your SEO strategy with the right approach to search terms will help you avoid mistakes and take actions toward success.

11. Your website does not have a good internal link structure.

Pages that are linked to the most within a website are considered to be more relevant than other site pages. If a specific page is important to a business, it will be linked to more frequently from other pages. Google pays attention to how sites are interlinked and how traffic flows through a website. Google is more likely to rank important site pages than ones of lesser value.

Build power to the most important website pages by linking to them from other website pages.

12. The website page speed or load time is too slow.

Most web users are on mobile devices and faster loading pages reduce site bounce rates and dropped shopping carts. Google thinks page loading speed is so important that it created a website for testing page speed. PageSpeed Insights allows users to enter the URL of their website and see how fast the site loads and Google scores how well it delivers content to users. On a simple level, a site can score in red, yellow, or green for PageSpeed. If your site scores anything but green, it needs to be optimized better.

Optimized web site design and plugins can increase PageSpeed.

Why would Google want to rank a web page high that is not fast and makes a user wait to download the website? If Google continually returned slow sites in searches, it would make Google look bad and web users would start using a search engine that delivered faster results. Creating a faster loading site reduces the bounce rate, makes visitors happy and helps Google look good for offering good search results.

When you consider all the many factors involved in your website’s SEO score and overall performance, business owners can be overwhelmed with improving their site’s search engine visibility. Hiring a top SEO services agency can be an effective way to audit page listings and handle metrics and algorithmic decisions and fixes.