Each year the percentage of customers who start their journeys online gets larger, it’s over 70% as of 2022. Unlike physical storefronts, in terms of new users at least – businesses are at the mercy of search engines and there are many reasons that your website might not be being found.
With a little bit of elbow grease you can tackle some low-hanging fruit by reading the 3 reasons why your website is not being found on Google search results.
3 reasons why your website is not being found on Google search results
1. Your site is not being indexed!
The most simple and important part of this process is to make sure that your site is actually being indexed by Google. And, in order to even be properly indexed, your website needs to have its sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.
It’s not an instant process, how long of a wait will depend on a few factors, including how well your content is optimized and organized.
In order for Google to rank your site, it has to go through the following 3 steps:
- Site Discovery: By processing XML sitemaps and following its links, Google discovers new and updated pages and queues them for crawling.
- Webite Crawling: Google then crawls each of those discovered pages and passes all of that information to the indexing process.
- Indexing Process: The indexing processes handle website content analysis, render the pages and decide whether or not to index them.
2. You don’t have a Google Business page
If you have a storefront, Google business listings are an important part of moving up in Google’s rankings. This free tool enables you to manage and optimize your business profile directly on Google search results and Google Maps.
Not only is having Google Business profile great for improving your visibility on Google, but it also lets you respond to customer reviews, answer their questions, enable DMs, and access other helpful business tools.
3. You are discouraging search engines from indexing the site
This happens when blocking the Googlebot crawler in your robots.txt and/or (if it’s a Wordpress site, our specialty) the “discourage search engines from indexing this site” is checked.
At the very least your robots.txt file could look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /On the other end of this spectrum, it’s worth noting that even if that checkbox is checked it’s still up to Google to honor the request.
Do you need help getting your website found on Google? 3tone Digital is here to help and our digital marketing specialist Reina loves to talk SEO – send us a message today!
Frequently asked questions
This process can take anywhere from 3 hours to 3 weeks depending on content quality, page authority, and Google’s current queue.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
When logged in, place /wp-admin/options-reading.php after your website’s homepage URL.