You've spend thousands of dollars on your beautiful small business website, or maybe hundreds of hours of your precious time learning how to do it all yourself, and yet, while your friends are Oohing and Aahing over your beautiful design, fonts and images, your phone and email are silent. The enquiries aren't coming. The problem? Your website isn't visible on Google. Your dream clients aren't seeing it and aren't visiting to buy the services you know they need.
Why is it so?
1. Your site isn't indexed yet
What does that mean?
It means that Google doesn't know your website exists yet. You need to connect it to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This might happen automatically depending on the site builder you use when you enable analytics. The best way to check is to type 'site:yourwebsiteURL' into Google and see if your website shows up. If it doesn't you need to visit Google Search Console and submit your sitemap, which will typically be something like 'yoursiteURL/sitemap.xml'. And if all that sounds way too complicated please reach out to me, I'd be more than happy to help.
2. Your website is slow
Google won't be showing your website to anybody if your website is slow, so fix your speed. This can often get quite techy, but some of the solutions can be simple such as having large images on your website. All your images shuoud be no more than a few kilobytes in size, so reduce their size before you upload them. If you're managing your own website, you don't need fancy or expensive software to do this. I use Photoscape to manage my images and there are many other programs and apps that will do the same.
Test your website speed by visiting https://pagespeed.web.dev/ You will not only get page speed results, you will also get tips for improving your page speed. If some of these improvements turn out to be quite techy feel free to reach out to me. And no, getting a brand new website is not the solution, Or just getting a landing page. You've build up SEO trust in your website and you don't want to lose that and start from scratch. Often a couple of hours of work is all that's needed to fix a slothy website. Ok, mine took a bit longer, but it was so worth it.
3. Your copy stinks
Are you writing for humans or robots? Do you know what the people you want to serve are looking for? Do you know what they type into Google? Often website copy is riddled with jargon or aspirational copy written by professionals who have no idea how their clients talk. If you want more clarity about what to write about on your website download my free Keyword Research Cheeatsheet and start telling Google what you really do.
Your copy also has to be clear and direct. Google, and humans, need to be able to tell within five seconds of visiting your homepage who you are, what you offer and how they can buy from you. If you don't answer those questions, Google simply won't show your website to people.
4. Your site isn't mobile friendly
Over 60% of searches now occur on a mobile device, so if your website isn't mobile ready, it won't be served up in search results. If your website is old and you haven't looked at it in several years, the likelihood of it not being mobile ready is high. What was mobile responsive a few years ago, might not be so now.
5. Your site has no backlinks
A backlink is a link to your site from another website. Without these your site has no authority, something that is especially important for AI search. Research what free backlinks you can obtain, especially in local business directories, reach our to other business owners in your network to see if you can support each other with mutual backlinks and definitely set up a Google and a Bing Business Profile. Do not pay for backlinks as Google does not allow paid backlinks.
6. You've forgotten about SEO
Once you've done your keyword research, you need to use those keywords in the right places such as your page titles and headings, page URLs and meta descriptions. If this sounds overwhelming, especially if you have a large website with many pages or products, let's have a chat and see how we can work together to make the job a bit easier.
7. Your content is stale
Google likes fresh content and websites that produce it rank higher than websites than don't. If your website is static with no new content, no new articles or blog posts, Google won't show it as readily as one that is constantly pumping out fresh copy. Sometimes even updating your homepage or your Services page, or adding new products is better than no updating at all. If writing fresh content just doesn't fit into your schedule, why not outsource it to a copywriter? I offer one-off blog post copywriting, or multi-post packages. Just check out my Copy Shop.
It's all code and text
When you see your beautiful website that you have spent countless hours or thousands of dollars on, Google only sees code and text. It's your job to make sure that that code and text is correct and that it is in all the right places and does all the right things. Now Google your own business and tell me what happens. Is it the first result? Or is it hiding somewhere on the third page? If it's the latter and doing all the things feels like all too much, please get in touch.
