There is nothing more frustrating than trying to find your business on Google. You type in your company’s name, and all you get are results for other businesses with the same name, or worse yet, no results at all.
If your business isn’t showing up on Google, you’re not alone—over 60% of small businesses haven’t claimed their free Google Business Profile Listing. This listing includes your business location on Google Maps, basic business information like your hours and contact details, as well as a basic business profile that you can update.
You may think something is wrong with your website or that someone else has already claimed the name of your business—and sometimes, you’re right. Other times, though, there may be other reasons your business isn’t showing up on the first page of search engine results.
This article will offer essential tips to get your business more visibility on Google, but more complex issues may require greater expertise. We’ll go over different strategies to find out why your business isn’t showing up on Google and how to fix any problems.
Getting Listed on Google Maps
Google Business Profile Listings are the foundation of your business online. Customers who find you through this service are up to 50% more likely to make a purchase, and many of them wind up visiting an in-store business within a day of their search.
Image source: https://infographicexpo.com/google-my-business-gmb-infographic
If you don’t have one, it can confuse potential customers who Google your company name only to find another business with the same name.
Start by signing up for a Google Business Profile account. This free account will allow you to add and edit information on your business such as its physical business address, contact details, and operating hours.
Once you’ve created an account, ensure all the information you provide is correct and up-to-date. Google also offers a post-submission verification code to help ensure that your business information is accurate and ready to be displayed on Google Maps.
Once your Google Business Profile page shows up regularly in your Google local search results, all you have to do is keep it current. However, there’s a lot more to becoming a true local authority than simply creating a Google account and updating your Google business dashboard.
You can build more location authority by targeting local searches with pages designed especially for each region and then ranking those pages for lots of keywords. Let’s talk about what that means next.
Indexing, Ranking, and SERPs—What it Means to “Show Up” on Google
“Showing up” on Google means a link to your site appears at or near the top of the page for a given search term.
The first page of Google search results is a list of web pages ranked by a “ranking” algorithm that considers many different factors.
The factors that determine the results you’ll see in any particular search include:
- The words contained on your webpage (their relevance).
- How many other sites link to your webpage (its popularity/authority).
- Your page’s ranking for any number of keywords or phrases in which people may be searching for your business.
For small businesses, the goal is to develop strategies that increase your ranking for phrases most relevant to your business—while also building authority and popularity, both of which will improve your rankings for various terms.
Indexing
Indexing is when Google takes the content on your website and categorizes it to be found in search engine results.
Every time you publish a new webpage, it takes some time for Google to index your site and include those pages in search results.
If your business isn’t showing up on Google, the first thing you should do is check your indexing by searching: site: [your_domain]
This command will show you how many pages on your website Google has indexed. If the number is much lower than expected, it could be a sign that Google hasn’t indexed all of the pages on your website.
Ranking
Page ranking refers to how high your website ranks in search engine results. Search engine results are listed in order of which websites show up first in Google’s SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages.
It’s not enough to get indexed; you need to rank high, too.
Many different factors impact how well your website ranks in Google, but close association with the keywords you want to rank for is one of the most important. You can help improve your page ranking by building up “backlinks” or links from other websites pointing back at yours.
Understanding the Google Algorithm
OK, so that heading might be a little misleading—even the most knowledgeable SEOs don’t have a complete understanding of the Google algorithm. It constantly changes and grows, but there’s plenty to learn about what works and what doesn’t.
When ranking websites on its SERPs, Google uses an algorithm that considers hundreds of different factors.
These factors can include keywords, links pointing to your website, how many people click on your listing after searching for a specific term, how long they spend on your website once they click on it, and many other factors. You’ll sometimes hear these factors called authority, relevance, and technology—the ART of SEO.
Authority
The best way to increase your ranking is often to improve your site’s authority. This isn’t a quick process by any means—it usually takes months or even years of hard work—but there are some simple steps you can take to improve your authority.
Authority refers to the trust Google places in your site—how much it trusts that your site accurately represents the topic you’re covering. All of the factors listed above determine authority, but there are specific strategies you can implement to improve authority. Read more about authority in SEO here.
Relevance
Your relevance is related to how closely your website matches the search terms someone enters into Google. For example, if you sell wedding cakes in Dallas, TX, it’s important that your web pages include relevant keywords like “Dallas wedding cake” or “wedding cakes in Dallas.”
You can improve your relevance by ensuring all of your site’s pages are highly relevant to the terms you want them to rank for.
If you’re having trouble with this, try using a tool like SEMRush or Moz to determine which keywords people in your town are searching for. Then work those keywords into the content on your site.
Technology
No matter how strong your marketing message is or how relevant your website is to the search terms customers are entering, none of that matters if your site isn’t fast enough.
The technology behind a website’s speed is measured by Google. Page speed is an important component in their algorithmic ranking system. As you build out your website, make sure that you optimize your website software for page speed to keep page load times low.
Use a tool like GTmetrix to see how well your website is performing. Tools like this can help you pinpoint problems on your site and advise how to fix them. Plus, they utilize Google’s speed measuring software “lighthouse,” so they’ll show you the same results that Google would see.
Before you can build a truly excellent website that’s relevant and authoritative, you have to have some understanding of what Google is looking for in the first place.
What Google is Looking For
Google is constantly changing the standards for what they consider “good content.” They’re looking to provide their searchers with highly relevant results that are informative, trustworthy, and authoritative. If you want your website to get indexed by Google, you need to meet these standards.
If you can keep up with Google’s ever-evolving requirements for high-quality content, you’ll be in good shape. It’s hard to nail down a specific list of rules for high-quality content, but here are a few basic guidelines:
- Make your site easy to read and navigate.
- Provide the most accurate information possible on each page.
- Provide information that is rich in facts, figures, and statistics.
- Offer visitors the opportunity to buy products featured on your website.
- Keep up with the latest trends in your industry.
- Make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for on your site.
The most important aspect of SEO is also one of the easiest things to overlook: make sure you always provide valuable content that’s relevant to both humans and search engines alike.
If your website is slow, poorly designed, or doesn’t offer visitors anything of value, it won’t matter if you do everything else right—no one will visit your site.
Identifying Why Your Site Isn’t Showing Up on Google
Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and even less used alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and AOL rely on spiders (also called robots or crawlers) that visit websites and then add information to their databases based on what they find. Websites can have a combination of text, images, and video to enable users to find the information they want on your site. They can also use non-human readable information like meta tags, structured data, and indexation directives to help these spiders do their job.
The search engines take many things into account when delivering results to users, including site content, domain age, links to your website, and social media activity. As a result, your website may not show up in the top few results even if it’s been built with SEO best practices.
Also, brand new websites tend to rank lower than older websites that have more authority and “trust” built up over time. This is known as the “sandbox effect.”
Give your website at least three months to see results. If you’re still not showing up in the search engine results at all, here are some steps you can take to help get indexed.
Troubleshooting Steps
If you’ve done all of this and your site is still not ranking, there are a few things to check:
Check the Crawl Errors Report in Google Search Console
This report will tell you if there are any errors on your site, including problems with pages being indexed too slowly. You may see errors like broken links and redirects, missing images, and incorrect page titles.
If you do see any errors in this report, don’t panic; there are ways to fix them. To improve your site’s ranking, look into fixing crawl errors that can be easily fixed, like pages with missing images or redirecting to 404 pages.
Fixing broken links is crucial for your website to show up in Google. If your website is linking to broken pages or files, even if you have high-quality content, likely, this page will not show up. To fix missing images, create a 301 redirect rule in your .htaccess file so that searches can take visitors to the correct location.
Check Your Robots.txt File and Other Settings on Your Web Server
If your site is not indexed, it may be because of an incorrect robots.txt file on your site. Robots.txt files are hidden files that control how search engines interact with certain pages on your website.
Check which pages are being blocked by the robots.txt file by checking through the list of URLs listed in the Google Search Console. Fix any problems that are preventing Googlebot from accessing your content.
Track down any errors in robots meta tags, which can cause pages of your site not to show up in search engines at all (this is rare) or to be crawled incorrectly.
SERP Features and Other Visibility Tips
Now that you’ve got your site indexed, it’s time to show up in the search results.
But you can enhance your site to further enhance your visibility in search even if you’re already ranking. SERP features such as site links, rich snippets, and knowledge graph cards help to further improve your site’s visibility.
However, Google usually selects its SERP features from the top-ranking pages. There’s no way to guarantee that your page will be the one Google picks for a featured snippet or knowledge panel.
If your website is not indexed, it’s likely you’ll never get to enjoy any of these features. To improve your chances, optimize your site for your customers, write relevant content, and stick to content focused on your business. Then, tweak your site to accommodate Google’s SERP features to make your pages even more visible in the search results.
Here are a few of the more common SERP features to aim for:
Featured Snippets
A featured snippet is a highlighted box of text that Google displays in the search results as an attempt to directly answer a users question.
It’s essentially Google creating its own version of what it thinks might be useful content on your site then placing it at the top. This usually occurs because you’ve written an answer to a question or topic that people are searching for.
Featured snippets have a jaw-dropping impact on organic traffic. Reports show that featured snippets can increase traffic for already-ranking content by over 600%, with clickthrough rates increasing eightfold.
If you want to increase your chances of having a featured snippet, here are a few tips:
- Create pages that directly answer question keywords.
- Answer the question keyword succinctly and near the top of the page.
- Keep the snippet answer to approx. 45-70 words. The maximum is 97 words.
- Use a Wordpress plugin to structure page data in such a way that Google can navigate it to identify your snippet.
Although Google highlights some of the best content in its search results, not all of it will be used for featured snippets or rich card results. Certain categories are more fitting for featured snippets, such as DIY-related questions or questions that require industry expertise. And some types of websites, such as recipe and local directories, are more likely to earn knowledge panel rich results.
Knowledge Panels
A knowledge panel is a more definitive answer. When someone searches for entities that exist in a knowledge graph (people, places, organizations, things) a search engine might show a knowledge panel. Common examples include historical places, celebrities, pop culture events, or other parts of society. For example, if you search for a historical figure, a movie star, or a new book, chances are you will see a knowledge panel in your search results instead of a snippet.
Knowledge panels serve information that search engines store in their knowledge graph – basically a large database of information that represents a search engines understanding of the world and how its components are related. This means that you won’t have complete control over all the information in a knowledge graph result, but you can influence it.
Here are a few tips to help you get started on targeting a knowledge panel:
- Use high-quality images with file names and alt text that describe the thing that they represent.
- Use fact-based information when talking about your products, services, or business locations on your website.
- Use structured data to mark up the most important elements on the webpage that you’d like featured in the knowledge pane.
- Claim ownership of the knowledge panel if Google is already showing one for your business, product, or service.
You may request updates to this panel if you are the subject or authorized representative of a company or organization featured in a knowledge panel.
Sitelinks
This is a type of SERP feature Google uses to list additional links to the most important pages of your website underneath your existing search result.
These links can help users find the page they need faster, and they help your site take up more space in the search engine. A big win for you, when there is limited space on any searcher’s screen.
Here are some tips to take advantage of site links:
- Make sure that the most important pages on your site are linked in both the header and the footer.
- Add navigation structured data to your website.
- Make sure the text you use for your page title and your h1 heading is informative, relevant, and compact.
- Use internal links on your website to connect meaningful pages, and use anchor text that is concise and represents the page that a user will go to if they click the link.
- Don’t repeat yourself too many times on any page, or throughout your site.
- Gain enough authority via links to your site that Google considers you as a candidate for sitelinks.
With site links in your SERP result, you have a better chance of getting relevant clicks from more users who will stick around for longer.
Related Questions
When someone types a question into Google, a “related questions” section of the search results might appear. This section contains a list of questions that someone might ask after seeing the answer to their original question. Sometimes users click them because they got their answer and they want to do more research. Other times, people click these results because their original search did not produce any results that answered their question. Related questions may be referred to as “People also ask” results (PAA’s) or “More to ask” on Google.
This feature is especially good for websites that want to attract more users looking for information. It’s also beneficial because these lists can help you increase your website’s audience and rank for more keyword terms.
Here are some important tips to take advantage of this section:
- Research some of the questions your customers are asking by searching for a question related to your product or service and clicking the related questions results to explore the types of answers people seek.
- Answer questions factually. If you have an industry expert who can write, ask them to answer some of the most common questions they get about your business in a blog post.
- Create content that’s easy to skim. A list of questions is an obvious example, but anything from a table of contents or bullet points can increase your chances of being used as an answer.
- Create content that answers long-tail question keywords. Use these question keywords as subheaders within your informational content.
- Get creative with the types of content you create. Some industries may only want to write how-to articles, but there are many other options you can experiment with.
Ensure you’re answering relevant, common questions about your business or industry. Don’t think that just because you can answer a question it will automatically help your website rank better. Instead, map out a strategy that examines question keywords, long-tail keywords, and ranking competitor pages before you create something.
Getting Links to Your Site (and Avoiding the Bad Ones)
Once you’ve got your website in good shape, you’ll want to start earning links that will help your website rank better.
Even if you’ve created killer content, you probably aren’t the first to do so. Other websites have likely written about the same thing. One way that Google ranks these sites is by examining the links pointing at each page.
Links are commonly compared to “votes” for your site. The more you get, the more important or trustworthy your site looks to search engines. Similarly, many “votes” from the same website do not count as much as new links from a variety of websites, so it’s important to earn links from as many unique domains as possible. The more high-quality links you have coming into your site, the higher you’ll tend to rank in organic search results.
Some tips to keep in mind when you’re acquiring links:
- Check out your competitor’s backlink profiles. Identify the websites that link to them and ask if they would be willing to link to your site if you have content their readers will enjoy.
- Find websites that talk about similar topics to what you talk about, and ask if they’d be willing to link to something on your website that their audience would find informative.
- Make sure that links to your website use your brand name or website URL when possible.
- If you can get a link from someone in your niche, make sure the link is surrounded by text and images that provide context about your website, product, or service.
- Try to get links to the most valuable pages on your website first, like homepages, product pages, or contact pages.
- When possible, use relevant contextual links instead of non-contextual ones like blog comments or forum signatures.
- If you choose to buy links, proceed with caution. Google has penalized websites for buying links, especially when connected to link schemes like private blog networks or any other service intended to manipulate PageRank.
While you may get away with a few paid links, Google can easily tell if it’s an excessive amount and then flag the entire website for spammy linking practices. That means all of your hard work could go down the drain if you aren’t careful.
Outsourcing and Getting Help
Since building and maintaining a website can be pretty complicated, it can be daunting if you try to do it on your own.
When outsourcing work in the SEO industry, it’s important to hire reputable companies with experience working with brands like yours. If you don’t have a large marketing budget but still want a hands-on approach to SEO, look for an agency that offers affordable packages and hourly rates.
At Searchbloom, we have a team of in-house experts who can help you with everything from keyword research to outreach. Our services are personalized to your website and industry, so you know that the work we’re doing will help your site rank better.
If you are looking for SEO services, then you can contact us for a review of your website. Our mission is to help companies grow their online presence with straightforward, effective digital marketing strategies that produce results.
If your business is ready to take the next step forward in digital marketing, then contact us today for a free consultation.
