In this blog post, we focus on the reasons why your site does not get good results in search engines, even though the site is ready to serve the visitors and eventually even convert them as a customer.

Your site may look good from the outside, but it will not stand up to deeper scrutiny. In this case, your site does not rank with the right search terms — or does not place with any search terms. There are many reasons for this, because search engine optimization is never simple. Here are the most common reasons:

1) Google has not indexed your website yet

If you do not add new content to your site regularly, or if your site is new, there may be a problem here. Sometimes Google robots simply take a surprisingly long time to go through your site. To speed up the process, deliver a sitemap from your site to Google in google search console.

2) Your website is new

If your site is new, then it is likely that you will not place in the high rankings of the search results. There is a simple reason for this: because you cannot. To rank well in the search results, you need high-quality, search engine-optimized content and strong external links to your site.

3) You have blocked the indexing of your website from search engines

This may sound funny, but we have run into problems like this in our work. Check your site’s meta tags, robots.txt file, and Yoast SEO add-on settings to make sure no-index tag is placed on important pages. Use this command to tell the search engine that you do not want the page indexed — that is, found in the search results.

4) The keynotes you use may not mean what they should mean.

Explore and analyze what kind of search terms people use to search for your products or services in different situations. There are differences in the search periods when the applicant is looking for information or for a service/product. For example, with the search for “Marketing,” Google wants to display as much information as possible about what marketing is and how it is done, and therefore does not start offering websites for companies that provide marketing services.

5) The keywords you use are highly competitive

It is not wrong to fight for success in search engines with the keywords that get the most searches, but it is more important to pick the right fight that you can win. If your competitors’ websites are stronger than yours, then it is very difficult to get search visibility with competitions with search terms. So, it makes more sense to choose less competitive search terms and go for good investments in such terms, while increasing the strength of your site and only then targeting competing key terms.

6) Your content is not of high quality and search engine optimized

There is either very little content on your website or your content is not of high quality. There can also be a lot of content on your site, which does not always mean it is of high quality. Usually, long content produces results, but if the search term has been used too much, this content can come back to bite you and even reduce the chances of good investments. View the content on the websites of better-placed competitors and simply make better content, or at least strive for what they do.

7) There are problems under your hood

Imagine the outside of your website as a gorgeous and flashy car, the interior is perfect too, but it is terrible to drive and you abandon it after the first ride in your garage and you will never drive it again. You certainly do not want a prospecting customer to think this way about your website and therefore, decide to get a product or service somewhere else. Google also measures and studies the behavior of visitors to your site.

Google can see deeper than the surface: your site may have problems you do not notice. The most common problems are:

  • Duplicate content, i.e. there are several pages with the same content on the site
  • Confusing site structure
  • There is no new relevant content on the site on a regular basis
  • Exhaustion or poor utilization of basic data, e.g. metadata
  • Mobile incompatibility
  • The site loads slowly

8) Third parties do not pay attention to your content

The external link to your site is comparable to audio. So, another website has voted your content to be relevant and useful when it links from its own site to your site. Search engines interpret external links to your site this way, and if you receive links from strong sites, you can only expect your investments to rise. Therefore, make sure to create content that other websites want to share on their own pages. We never recommend buying external links as they can bring the opposite reaction to your investments.

9) Google has given you the command to freeze

Have you previously received good investments on one of your pages, but these pages have suddenly disappeared from the search results? This may be because Google has put your site on freeze. You can check the Google Search Console to see if Google has imposed such penalties on your site. If so, the only option is to fix the following issues:

  • Your site has been hacked
  • Users of your site post malicious content on your site
  • Hide content from users who try to affect search results.
  • Malicious external links to your site
  • Malicious links from your site
  • Harmful content on your website

10) You have forgotten about other digital marketing channels

There are many different channels to take advantage of in digital marketing. Search engine optimization, key word advertising and social media advertising should be used by everyone to create a functional marketing mix. Using other channels does not have as direct of an impact on the ranking as many other factors, but Google interprets a lot of signals other than what you post on your own site. By bringing users from multiple sources to your site, you often improve your rankings in the search results.

11) Simply put, competitors are one step ahead of you

You are not the only one pursuing these investments. Search engine optimization has become more common in Finland at a tremendous rate in a short period of time and no one wants to fall behind. And you certainly should not. Everything you do not do, I am sure your rival will. SEO is not a project you can do a little bit from time to time, it is a constant struggle against your competitors. If you have gotten one step ahead of them, that does not mean it is permanent, you have to fight for achievements.

Travel in small steps towards victory

You have a lot of work to do if you want to get better investments on your website. This is why we should start search engine optimization now and not next month. Even small steps can bring about great things.