Reasons Why You’re Not Ranking on Google And How To Fix It

“Why is my website not ranking on Google?” This is a common question I see people ask in different forums all the time. Instead of explaining the problem and trying to help, a bunch of so called SEO experts starts offering their services. I get it, we all need to make money, but to educate others could lead to a potential client. I do think it’s important that business owners are aware of why SEO is so important. In this article, I’ll try to give the answer to a question I received from someone asking why their website was not ranking on Google.

“I have created a simple one page WordPress website for my client. Unfortunately, on Google it cannot be found at all.. Do you have any basic SEO tips? I have used Yoast SEO plugin and it seems to be working fine. What can I do to improve the rankings? We just need a very basic solution.”

First of all, have you tried typing in site:domain.com to know if its already indexed by Google? It could be that you don’t rank for certain keywords yet, not even your own site name, but that doesn’t mean that the site might not be indexed.

One page websites are horrible for SEO. The more pages, the better. Google likes content so you shouldn’t keep anything short and minimalistic. The one page website is also probably stuffed with keywords in different categories. Each page needs to be focused on a few keywords based on the page topic.

Each page needs to be optimized for search engines. Using an SEO plugin, such as Yoast SEO, is great when you write articles and content for a page, but a plugin does not rank or index your website. It only gives you guidelines on how to write properly for search engines.

Basic guidelines for on page SEO would be to:

• Use proper h1, h2, h3 tags
• Image alt text
• Related internal and external links
• Use long-tail keywords

To help Google index your site faster, you can submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console. Once submitted, Google will crawl your website. Test to search your website name and see if it comes up after and a day or two.

Also, check robots.txt to see if it’s set to no index.

SEO is not a set and forget thing. To rank for certain keywords is a long game and can take a while. Your website needs regular content updates.

How long does it take Google to rank a new website?

Many services that can guarantee you first page ranking only get temporary results and once Google discovers this, your site gets penalized and pushed to a lower ranking. I would not recommend using any SEO firm that tells you that they can rank your website fast. The average time for websites to rank on Google through SEO is about three to six months. This also depends on the competitiveness of your industry and the popularity of your keywords.

If you have an SEO question, don’t hesitate to contact me or comment below and I will try my best to help you!