Building a new website for your business is a great step towards acquiring new clients, but it’s not enough to stop there. You need to keep working at it until you rank for the keywords that people are searching for on Google. If you rank high, then you can get a lot of new clients because people and Google will find your website. If you don’t rank for the keywords that people search for, then your website will never get any traffic. To help avoid this, you’ll want to make sure that you aren’t making any SEO mistakes. If you want to avoid common SEO mistakes, then we’ve got just the thing for you. Here are four common reasons why your website is ranking poorly on Google.
Wrong Keywords
If you are a personal injury lawyer, are you using words from potential client’s queries when you write your meta title or H1 tag? If you’re not, then consumers and search engines won’t know what your page or website is about.
Google Isn’t Indexing Your Site
Maybe you’re not coming up in search engine results because Google doesn’t know about your website. They might not be able to find it, and even if they can, they might not know how to index it.
A reason you could not be in Google’s index is that they cannot crawl your website because there is a technical directive in your robots.txt file or a noindex directive at the page level. While you may not have made these commands, they might have been added by an outside source, such as an IT department. You may not even know that this was done. While there are good reasons you could want to block search engines from crawling your website, for most of the time you would want them to crawl through your website.
Lack of Authoritative Backlinks
Once you have a website, it is important to take steps to build authority and credibility online as well as rank for search engines. If users search for a word or phrase, Google wants to return the best results possible to them. As a result, the best results are from sites that demonstrate expertise in their field. To determine which site is most authoritative, Google looks at its content and the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to it.
Your Site Has Been Penalized By Google
Whenever you break Google’s guidelines, you may get hit with penalties. This can take the form of anything from building lots of spammy backlinks to your website to using over-optimized anchor text or thin/duplicate content. Be sure to build your site according to Google’s guidelines to ensure that you aren’t hurting your own rankings.
Conclusion
We hope this article proves to be useful when it comes to helping you optimize your online content. As you can see, there are a slew of things that you want to watch out for as they can negatively affect your SEO ranking. Be sure to keep everything you’ve learned here in mind so that you can make the most informed decisions for your business’ website.
SEO Queen provides SEO services for California businesses to help rank their eCommerce website high in the search engine. Contact us today to get started!