It can be a real nightmare for any business – you pull up a Google search for your top keywords, and the results appear – except your site isn’t listed. 

If your site isn’t showing up in Google search results, you can feel confident there’s a reason. Your challenge is to figure out what that reason is. 

Google Hasn’t Indexed Your Website

If Google doesn’t index your website, it’s not going to show up in search results. 

There are a few reasons that your site is not being crawled or indexed by Google bots. 

One is if your site is new. It can take a few weeks for Google to index your site and reflect these changes in search engines. 

Another issue may be if you have “no index” tags on your site. If your site is older and it isn’t indexed, check for “no index” tags before doing anything else. These tags will keep search bots from “looking” at or indexing certain pages. 

Your Website Has Been Issued a Penalty 

Penalties may also keep your site from showing up in SERPs. 

If you haven’t met Google’s quality guidelines, it can permanently or temporarily remove the site from search results. 

Some of the most common types of Google penalties include:

  • Deindexed: Domain is removed from search results completely.
  • Penalized: Domain exists by you can’t find your page with a direct search.
  • Sandboxed: Google traffic drops, but the domain wasn’t penalized or deindexed. 

Your Site’s Not Optimized for Search

If you cannot find your site when you search, you may need to improve your SEO. 

Most search engines, including Google, will consider hundreds of different factors when ranking your site. Because of this, you must invest in SEO, which helps ensure your website is optimized to rank on page one in Google SERPs. 

SEO utilizes multiple strategies all that are designed to help improve your site rankings and help increase conversions and revenue online. Even if your site looks beautiful and has been designed carefully, you will never rank in SERPs if you don’t invest in SEO. If you don’t rank in SERPs, there’s a good chance that you won’t get calls about the products or services you offer, either. 

Poor Quality Content

Have you ever heard the phrase “content is king?” If the copy published on your website is of poor quality, there is a very good chance your site will not appear in Google SERPs. 

Google and other search engines will rank sites that provide the highest quality content and best match a person’s search intent while satisfying the queries they make.

When you create content, you need to ensure it is comprehensive enough that it will answer a searcher’s questions, so they won’t hit the back button to see another result. 

Improving Your Site to Appear in Google SERPs

If you want to ensure your site appears in Google SERPs, you must figure out why it may not be here. The information here provides you with a good starting point.