So you’ve got a website for your business, but you aren’t showing up on the first Google Ranking page. Google must hate your website right? Well actually, that could be true! There are some very basic but important things that will cause Google to lower your ranking, pushing you to the dreaded second page and beyond, but most of these are easily fixed.
Take a look at 5 of the reasons Google hates your website!
Your Website Design is Out of Date
Many of the factors that Google use to rank your website are built into it’s design. Google puts a very large focus on ranking websites that offer users a superior experience, so if your website isn’t engaging to your target audience you are going to see your website ranking lower and lower in search. Before you even begin to market your business or implement SEO, here are a few things to consider about your website’s design and usability:
- Is your website over 5 years old?
- Does your website work well on mobile? (Is it responsive?)
- Do your pages make use of heading tags?
- Is there a clear route through the website?
Your content offers little value to visitors
Google no longer ranks your website higher just for content that contains specific keywords. You need to be creating content that offers genuine value to your visitors. Google will look at the content on your site to determine if you are offering quality, engaging content as well as analysing how users interact with you, how long they spend reading your content and whether your content is being liked and shared.
Something else to consider is the depth of your content. It’s common for people to have excessive amounts of pages focussing on different keywords, but if your web page content consists of a short basic paragraphs of text with a search term used abundantly, it’s not very useful to a visitor and is not worthy of a good ranking.
Your website isn’t Search Engine Optimised
As we said above, you need to ensure that your website is up to scratch before you consider throwing time, effort and money at SEO, but if you have a quality website with lots of great content and you are still not showing up on search engines this will be why.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the activity that attempts to maximise the number of visitors to your website, by ensuring that the site appears high up on the list of results returned by a search engine. This process can involve a number of things such as creating and optimising meta details, implementing a sitemap, keeping website code clean and up to date and ensuring that page content is relevant to the user.
Your site speed is dreadful
Google places a big emphasis on the end user-experience. So if your website loads slowly, Google will deem it inefficient and penalise you in search engine rankings. This is not entirely surprising, as around 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Make sure your web site is optimized for speed with compressed images, streamlined code and a fast web server to ensure that your visitors are not frustrated by a slow website.
Your visitors abandon the website
As we’ve said before, Google wants to ensure that users get the best experience on the websites they find in search results. To see how engaging your website it, Google measures the bounce rate, to see the percentage of people who click away without exploring your website. In Google’s eyes, a high bounce rates means that your page layout is poor and isn’t designed with the user in mind.
In a similar way, Google looks at the amount of time users spend on the website. Google believes that if users are spending longer on your website, your content must be good quality. Weak content and mediocre web design influences users to turn elsewhere, and decreases time on site.
With careful planning and monitoring, we can help you to analyse why your website visitors aren’t sticking around, just give us a call!
How can I improve my Google ranking?
The first step to improving your Google ranking is to evaluate your website and how it works for your users. If there are serious failings in your website, it may be time to consider getting some work done to improve your site or even build a brand new website altogether. Once this has been achieved you need to implement regular onsite and offsite search engine optimisation as part of a larger digital marketing strategy.
We are specialists in website design, marketing and SEO, so if you are thinking of improving your search engine visibility, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you succeed online!
