In this day and age, your website is a hugely important part of your business. So when your website isn’t showing up in search results, that’s a critical area to address. So what's causing your website to perform poorly in search results? (Or not perform at all?)

Let's address four of the most common reasons that your website isn’t showing up in search results.

Your website is new

It’s a really difficult situation—you’ve spent the last month (or more likely, last several months) developing a new website. You’re ready to present it to the world like a proud parent. But two weeks after your launch, no one seems to like your child.

It can be hard to stay patient after the launch of a new website. But most experts find that it can take anywhere from four days to six months for Google to index new content. Even then, new websites are slower to be indexed than old ones. You can help speed the process along by asking Google to index your site here.

Your website lacks content

We are in the heyday of graphic web design. Giant videos, scrolling pages and minimalist design make for some truly stunning webpages. But they also make for some confused search engines. Think about it—search engines can’t see images or watch your compelling video. For all they know, your website is just a few pages with file names.

So how do you address this conflict between beauty and brains? Well, it’s time to compromise. Throw search engines a bone, and include at least a few paragraphs of text across your site chock-full of valuable and relevant keywords. Which reminds me…

Your content is wrong

Even if you sprinkle those juicy keywords throughout your site, you may not be showing up in search results. And that may be because those juicy keywords aren’t actually that juicy. Maybe you chose to use the term “attorney” when people actually search using the term “lawyer.” Maybe you wrote a lot about your company’s history and values but never actually mentioned the name of the product you sell!

Take a second look through your content. If strangers (because that’s what search engines are) looked through your web copy, could they understand what you’re trying to advertise?

Your coding is wrong

So you’ve submitted your website to Google, you’ve added keyword-rich content and you’ve waited. If you’re still not ranking for relevant keywords, it could be that you work in a highly competitive industry. Or it could be that something has actually gone wrong.

The easiest way to find out if your website has been indexed by Google is to search for your URL. Go to Google or another search engine, and type in the URL of your domain with “site” in front of it. So, for instance, if your site was “whichdoesntwork.com” you would enter “site:whichdoesntwork.com” into a search bar. If there are no results at all, that means your website hasn’t been indexed by the search engine.

This could be for a few reasons. The first and most pressing is that there is something in your robots.txt file that is blocking search engines from viewing your website. The best way to check for this is by testing your website in the Robots Testing Tool.

Robots.txt fine but your website still isn’t showing up in search results? It’s time to call in the professionals. Contact us today for more information about how to fix emergency SEO problems or even to just improve your rankings in the long haul.