When a new website is published, it won’t immediately appear in Google and other search engines. For many reasons, it takes a little bit of time for the site to appear (usually anywhere from a couple of days to sometimes a few weeks), but even being listed in Google doesn’t mean your website is getting new visitors. Your website needs to be one of the first several results when searching for relevant topics in Google. This is known as your search engine ranking.
Common reasons you’re not ranking well
- It takes time to rank: When you launch your website or when you publish a new piece of content it takes time for Google’s software (known as “bots”) to crawl your website and identify what’s new. Sometimes, the bots never find your website or they might only find some of the pages. Your website maintenance company can force Google to index your site, but its best to wait and see if Google crawls your site first, before pushing the issue.
- It takes constant effort: To rank on the front page of Google you need to consistently improve and increase your website’s content, as well as building quality citations and backlinks. All of this takes time and effort, but without this additional work, your site is unlikely to rank well in search engine results. A good website management company in Brisbane will take over this job for you, leaving you free to run your business and not worry about this additional work.
- Check your keywords: You might not be able to rank on the front page of Google simply because the competition for these slots is too fierce. You might however, easily rank on the front page for long tail keywords (e.g. phrases of 3 or more words, instead of 1 or 2), or keywords that you might not have considered. Just searching for generic terms related to your business might not produce the results you want, but when you try a more specific keyword/phrase, you’ll most likely find your website listed in the first few pages.
- Technical problems: Sometimes a website has been so poorly coded or configured that Google virtually ignores the website. There can also be issues with the robots.txt file, which is a file that can prevent search engines from indexing your website or other obscure reasons why your website does not show in search results. A website maintenance company can go through your website to check and correct any such problems for you.
What can be done to improve your ranking
This is where website management in Brisbane can be so valuable, because they can check everything to make sure that your site is optimised for ranking in Google and other search engines. The upshot is that it takes time, effort and consistency to reach the first page of Google, as well as good website management.
While there are many things you can do yourself to improve your ranking, engaging a website maintenance company that specialises in search engine optimisation (SEO) and website management in Brisbane is going to give you the best return on investment. This is because reputable SEO companies perform a huge range of tasks relating to your website configuration and content, as well as preparing a lot of content and information for distribution on the internet. There’s a huge time investment every month to continue to improve in this area.
And isn’t it better to focus on running your day to day business?
