This is one the most common questions website owners ask us. The answer however, isn’t so simple as there are dozens of potential reasons why a website isn’t appearing in search engine results. We’ll take a look at some of the most common reasons below, but this is not the end-all be-all list. It’s also important to realize you may have several of the problems listed below, or a combination of these issues with other technical problems.
If you are not familiar with web development and SEO, it is important to have a professional backend expert look at the structure of your website or use an online program to scan your website to pinpoint any problems.
1. Content (or Lack Thereof) – Search engines scan websites for content. If your website does not have enough content, or does not contain content that features the keywords you are entering into the search engine, your website will not show up for them.
2. Too Much Flash – If your home page is one giant flash splash screen, it means that there is no content as search engines cannot read the text in a flash animation. If there is no content to scan, your home page cannot be determined relevant for any words at all, let alone your targeted keywords.
3. You Haven’t Been Indexed Yet – If you are launching a new website, you need to submit your website to the search engines in order for them to find and index you. The time between submitting your site and actually getting it indexed could take a few weeks or a several months. If your website has been around for over a year and you have submitted your website to the search engines for indexing, this may mean that your website is experiencing other issues.
4. Black Hat Penalties – If you (either consciously or not) engaged in certain practices that are considered unethical by search engines, including keyword stuffing (creating content filled with keywords but no actual content), link farms (series of websites that all link to each other), and other trickery to fool search engines into giving you higher rankings, the search engines will discover this when they scan your website and penalize you. They won’t send you a letter, they’ll just send your website to page 10,000 for your keywords. The only way to redeem yourself is to remove the offensive techniques from your website and re-submit it to the search engine for indexing.
5. Duplicate Content – If you publish law firm web content that already appears elsewhere online, the search engines will penalize you and you will not rank for those keywords. Your web content must be 100% original and optimized with your law firm SEO keywords in mind in order for your website to achieve high search engine rankings for those specific terms.
6. No One is Linking to You (or you have broken links) – Link building is a very important for the success of your website. Search engines take into account who is linking to your website as well as who you are linking to. If no other quality, relevant websites are linking to yours, that will work against you with search engines. Likewise, if your website is filled with broken links, that may also cause your website to rank poorly in search engines.
7. Lack of Promotion and Lack of Patience – You need to actively promote your website in order to increase your inbound links, trust factor, and search engine rankings. This means constantly publishing new, relevant content, creating content outside of your website, leaving comments on blogs with your URL, and most of all being PATIENT. Great search engine rankings do not happen overnight. It is a process that requires a lot of time and effort. If you put the work in, it will pay off, but it may take up to a year for your site to start receiving a lot of traffic and you need to be prepared for that.
Having search engine optimized copy makes it easy for search engines to find your Web pages. Transform your law firm with our help. Explore our law firm marketing services and how they can benefit your practice. If your website doesn’t have the top search engine ranking on Google, We Do Web Content can help boost your web marketing goals. We Do Web Content takes pride in producing high-quality and affordable SEO web copy that is clean, consistent, and formatted for Internet marketing. We get excited when your website’s search engine ranking climbs and YOU ARE FOUND. Get started today – 1-888-521-3880.
Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.