This is a question I get asked all the time.
This video will help you answer this question.
If you don’t know who is visiting your website. Then take a look at this video, that explains how to connect Google Analytics to your website
Why isn’t my business showing up on Google?
It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often. There’s rarely a single answer, but these are the questions I work through with clients.
What do you want to be found for?
You want to be found for your business name, of course, but what else? Which search terms, and in which area? Be realistic. A financial adviser hoping to rank for “mortgage advice” across the whole UK is up against some very large competitors. Aiming for a specific service in your own town is a very different, and far more achievable, goal. Decide on your keywords and your area first. Then you can see how you’re actually doing for them.
Have you given it time?
Google isn’t instant. If you updated your website yesterday, Google won’t reflect it today, and it can take weeks. You can nudge things along by asking Google to recrawl your pages in Google Search Console (here’s how to set up Search Console), but improvement is gradual, not overnight.
Is anyone sending people to your website?
Visitors don’t arrive by magic. Someone has to put in the time, effort or money to send them there. That might be through social media, an email newsletter, or paid ads.
It helps to send people to genuinely useful content rather than straight to a sales pitch. This matters for Google too. As more people visit and spend time on your site, Google takes it as a sign your site is useful and gradually moves it up the rankings, which brings more visitors, and so on. If nobody sends people to your site, visitor numbers stay low and so do your rankings.
Do other websites link to you?
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. To Google, each one is a sign that someone else thinks your content is worth visiting. Swapping links with a friend doesn’t count for much. What matters is genuine one-way links. A good starting point is listing your business on free business directories. After that, it’s about creating content other people want to link to. More on this in our beginner’s guide to building backlinks.
Do you have good content?
This underpins everything else. You need your sales pages, but to attract visitors in the first place you need useful, non-salesy content: blogs, videos or podcasts that answer your customers’ questions. Good content gives you something to share on social media, a reason for other sites to link to you, and pages that match the search terms you want to be found for.
Are you measuring it?
Finally, keep an eye on the numbers so you can see what’s working. Here’s our guide to what to measure on your website.
Work through all of these steadily and your site will start to appear on Google. Plan your content around the search terms you care about, and it will start appearing for the right ones. If you’d like help, get in touch.
