6 Reasons Why Your Website is Not Ranking Well in Search Results

“How can I boost the ranking of my site?”“How to rank instantly on the 1st page of Google?”“What’s wrong with my website; why there are no leads?”

You must have asked yourself these questions several times at some point after launching your dream website. After all, you have spent a lot to come up with an amazing business site but now you’re frustrated since no one can find you on search engines.

In this highly-competitive digital era, almost many startups and well-established business owners are having trouble figuring out why their sites aren’t ranking well? A large number of ranking factors may be contributing to your lower placement in the Google and other search results. Well, you can fix all these major issues and get the desired results.

Here are 6 main reasons why your business website is not ranking well and practical tips to fix those issues:

1. Your Site isn’t Indexed in Google

It’s pretty obvious that If your site is not indexed in Google, then it will never appear in search results. Whether you have launched a brand new website or updated the existing one, if your site is not showing up in search results, chances are that Google hasn’t listed you yet.3 main reasons why this might happen:

 1st Reason: You may have de-indexed your site by mistake; sound strange but it may happen. So, make sure to check the Reading settings that will help you find out if you accidentally blocked Google from indexing your site. You may have put a “no-index” tag on your website. Make sure your site is set to “index”.

 2nd Reason: Google’s web crawling bot (spider) hasn’t crawled your site yet. This problem is pretty common with newly-launched sites, especially those with no regular publishing schedule. It really takes a significant amount of time for the Google bots to come to your website and index your content, so you don’t to worry about. If you want to resolve the issues, you need to submit your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tool that will actually make the process faster. Or, you can achieve this by sharing your blogs across different social media platforms.

 3rd Reason: You unknowingly developed your site on a de-indexed expired or penalized domain. If you are wondering to use an expired domain to launch a new website, then make sure to check its history carefully before purchasing.

2. Poor On-page Optimization

If you have managed to create strong backlinks and shared useful content relevant to your target keywords but failed to get the desired ranking, the reason could be a poor on-page optimization. Make sure your website content is properly optimized for organic search. If it’s not, then your website may face difficulties in improving its position in search results.Page titles, keyword density, XML sitemaps, Meta Tags, and other factors play a major role in helping search engines find out what your site is all about. When it comes to proper on-page optimization, you need to take several vital things into account such as:

• Keyword Placement & Density

Proper keyword placement is essential to help Google determine the subject of every page of your website. Don’t forget to add your target keyword/phrase in the title tag, beginning of the content and logically spread throughout the page. It is very important for SEO.

Make sure your content is written for humans, not just for search engines. You must ignore keyword stuffing in your content since it may be considered as spammy and Google may penalize your website for it. Your motive is to generate relevancy signals for search engines but not overdo it. If your website is powered by WordPress, then you must use Yoast SEO plugin which will help you optimize your pages while providing valuable tips to improve the readability of your content.

• Meta Tags Optimization

Google and other search engines use Metadata to find out what your website is all about. Each web page of your site should have its own meta tags set, and they must be optimized to define the page content. Some of the information of Meta Tags will actually show up in search results so you need to know how to update it as it’s usually the first thing your visitors will notice before they click to your website. If you are using an easy-to-manage Content Management System like WordPress, you can easily update the meta tags for each page.

• Improve your Title Tags

Your Title Tags also impact the search engines rankings of your site depending on what you add to them. Here are some important tips to improve title tags:

 Add the keywords you are targeting Make sure to keep the title length 55 characters Don’t repeat words again & again

• Improve Your Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions don’t play a major role in rankings, but they may affect your click-through rate. Here a few tips to improve meta descriptions:

 Always ask a question? It is an ideal way to attract any potential visitor. Keep the description length under 155 characters to avoid Google making it short. You must add a CTA like a phone number to make it easier for potential customers to contact you.

The best part about On-page optimization is that you only need to do it once. Once you’ve achieved to fix your page titles, image tags, and other elements, you can focus on providing valuable content and building quality backlinks.

3. Your Site is not Mobile-Friendly

We all are aware that mobile usage is overtaking desktop that’s why having a mobile-friendly site is essential. Google and search engines consider responsiveness and other user experience issues while providing the ranking. If your site doesn’t provide a better user experience on mobile, this will seriously affect your rankings in search results. So, your website must be fully “responsive” means when your site is viewed on tablets, smartphones, or other mobile devices, it will take the shape of that specific device. It shouldn’t require any pinching or dragging. Google will punish a website which offers terrible user experience.

How to Test Your Mobile Speed and Responsiveness

In order to find out if you have a mobile-friendly website or not, visit Google’s tool, you will get everything in detail with the required solutions. Some of the widely-preferred tools are: Think with Google PageSpeed Tools

4. No High-quality Content

When it comes to ranking high, you really need to come up with high-quality content. Whether it’s related to the website content or other blogs, articles & guest post, make sure you are providing quality content to the users. In most cases, individuals pay $1000 for website development and then make themselves down with low-quality content. It’s highly recommended to add at least 300–400 words of content on each page of your site. It will give search engines enough confidence that the information on your website is somewhat worthy. In order to rank well, you need to add keywords to the content without any stuffing.

Don’t forget to check keyword density before adding any content to the site. You can use keyword density checker provided by smallseotools.

So, make sure your website have a significant amount of quality content to perform well in Google and other search results. Apart from web page content, you should post 2000 words blog on a regular basis. Remember, long blog posts get more traffic.

Here are some practical tips to write better content:

 Provide helpful content that educates your target audience while engaging them.
 Stop promoting yourself and talking too much about your brand.
 Your blog should focus on audience problems and solutions to fix them.

Also read out: How to Sell your Products without Praising them?

5. URL and Site Errors

Search engines do not like URL and site errors on your website such as “404 Page not found”. This message shows that the user’s browser is unable to find the page that he/she wants to visit. Reasons why this might happen:

 URL may remove
 The URL contains an error or is incorrect
 The URL is adjusted
 The URL is not user-friendly and also not search engine-friendly: you send visitors and search engines a dead-end alley.

There are all kinds of errors that can lead to SEO problems. Unfortunately, many newbies do not realize that. Best Solution:

Scan your website for site and URL errors with Google’s Search Console:

 Log in to Google’s Search Console
 Click on “Crawl” on the left side of the menu
 Click on “Crawl”
 Check for site errors or URL errors

Make sure your website is free URL and site errors. There are too many different URL and site problems to formulate a bite-size solution here. Fortunately, the Search Console gives a solution almost for every error. For more information about the different types of errors and possible solutions, you can also go to the Search Console help center.

6. Your Website does not have a Good Sitemap

A sitemap is a file with an overview of all pages of your website which helps search engines:

 to find certain pages of your website
 get an idea of the structure of your website
 to crawl your website faster and more efficiently

And of course, good for the SEO of your website. If your site does not have a sitemap or have a defective sitemap, then you miss a chance to help search engines and therefore score higher on Google.

Best Solution:

Do not have a sitemap on your WordPress website yet? Then install the handy Yoast SEO plugin or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. These plugins automatically create a sitemap for your site and keep it up-to-date. Then check the Google Search Console if the sitemap of your website is also accurate and up-to-date:
Then check in the Google Search Console if the sitemap of your website is also accurate and up-to-date:

 Log in to Google’s Search Console
 Click on “Crawl” on the left side of the menu
 Click on “Sitemaps”
 Click on the “Add / test site” button in the upper right corner
 Enter the URL of your sitemap: e.g. http://domain.be/sitemap_index.xml
 Click the “Test” button
 Click on “Show test result”
 View the error details

Conclusion
With a proper content marketing, advanced SEO techniques, and zero spamming; it’s possible to boost the ranking of any website. Hope all these tips mentioned above will help you come up with a successful website in 2018.