Getting your website to rank is essential for your business. But have you wondered how your website can rank on Google? Even if you have done everything right with your website and it looks like the most aesthetically designed website, that won’t actually be enough for Google to rank your website. There can be many reasons why your website is not ranking on Google, but the 3 most common mistakes businesses make stops their websites from ranking.
- Your site content hasn’t been optimized
Optimizing your content can help to increase your rank, the most important content in your website include the Meta Tags and keywords. Most businesses will focus on the content and not realize that this is also important for ranking.
Meta Tags describe the contents of your pages on Google. They don’t actually appear on your website, but they tell Google and other search engines the title and the description for your webpage to help increase your website traffic. Meta tags are normally placed in the Title and description of each individual page with specific keywords and are visible on search engines.
Keywords represent the search phrases that users search on search engines, the search engine then uses that phrase to find a relevant webpage to that specific search phrase. Keywords have to be researched beforehand and optimized within the web pages to increase traffic and get your website ranking.
- Your website hasn’t been indexed by Google
Google uses web crawlers to try to understand what your webpages are about. They examine the content of your website, including images & video files, and the links in your website, to send back an indexing report to Google with all the information it had received. If your website hasn’t been indexed it won’t show up on google at all in any of the search results, so getting it indexed is important.
- Your website isn’t as responsive
Mobile usage has now increased for search engines, and having a website that isn’t responsive for devices including mobiles and tablets will affect your rank on Google. If a user has to pinch and adjust the web page to fit the size of their device, Google will penalize your website for an unresponsive website. The loading speed for websites is also important as it reflects how quickly the website responds to a request. If a website does take long to load, users will exit that website straight away and go visit another website with a faster loading speed.