5 Easy Steps to Fix Website Not on Google
Oh no! You’ve run into a major problem, after all this work, you have found your website not on Google.
There are a few easy steps you can take to get listed and start competing with businesses in your catchment area.
There is nothing worse than having a website that is waiting to make you money but you are disappointed because you are receiving no calls and no leads.
There are a number of reasons why your website not on Google, some of them relatively complex and some of them very simple.
We will discuss the 5 easy steps you can take to make your website the money making scheme you first envisioned.
How Do I Get my Website Showing up on Google Search?
How Do I Get my Website to Show up on Google Search? – Google is by far the most popular search engine and uses the most complex rules for ranking websites.
It uses algorithms to detect content on your website based on how useful this will be to potential customers.
It is therefore vital that your website content is optimised using a process called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Many people either build websites themselves using popular all in one web builder solutions or hire a web designer to build the website for them.
The problem with these 2 methods is that SEO is very often completely ignored.
You may build a great looking website or a designer may do this for you but you or they may have neglected SEO completely leaving you wondering, why is my fantastic looking website not on Google.
Why my WordPress Website is not Showing in Google Search
We recommend using a WordPress website and a great website designer and more importantly a website developer.
Ideally, you want to find the balance between someone who is not so small a business to be overloaded, who offers and advertises SEO and website development and a large firm that is faceless and will not offer support futher down the line.
Unfortunately, if you are reading this, it is very likely you do not have a designer that can handle your website SEO and you are wondering to yourself why is my website not on Google.
Next we discuss the 5 steps that will solve the website not on Google problem.
WordPress, Google and SEO Issues Before They Happen
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
SEO refers to the improvement of unpaid results (known as “natural” or “organic” results), and excludes direct traffic/visitors and the purchase of paid placement. Primarily SEO pertains to search engine.
Search engine optimization may target different kinds of search, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, adding content, modifying HTML, and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic. By May 2015, mobile search had surpassed desktop search.
As an Internet marketing strategy, Search engine optimization considers how search engines work, the computer programmed algorithms which dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
It is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine the higher the website ranks in the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then be converted into customers.
It differs from local search engine optimization in that the latter is focused on optimizing a business’ online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when a user enters a local search for its products or services. The former instead is more focused on national or international searches.
Without it you could have the best website in the world but it may never be seen. They say being on page 2 of Google is like putting an advert in the middle of a desert, simply put, with proper optimisation, you do not have an online business.
Over 50% of websites built worldwide are built with WordPress. There is a good reason for this.
Why is my website not on Google? Convert your existing website to WordPress and submit it to Google Sites using Search Console.
What is WordPress and Why do I Need a WordPress Website?
WordPress (WP, WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS.
Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes.
WordPress was originally created as a blog-publishing system but has evolved to support other web content types including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS) and online stores.
One of the most popular content management system solutions in use, WordPress is used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021.
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog.
The software is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license.
To function, WordPress has to be installed on a web server, either part of an Internet hosting service like WordPress.com or a computer running the software package WordPress.org in order to serve as a network host in its own right.
A local computer may be used for single-user testing and learning purposes.
Source: Wikipedia
OK, well that’s how Wikipedia explains it but that sounds super complicated, right? Let’s break it down a little and find out why wordpress websites are the best for you and your website SEO.
WordPress is effectively a system that allows you (or a website developer or website designer) to control your own content. This means you can add your own page titles, wording, images, blog articles and metadata. All a vital part of improving website SEO.
They also have plugins which are a piece of software that will take care of virtually everything you want your website to do with minimal need for coding.
There are many SEO plugins that you can download from WordPress that take you through how to optimise your website for Google ranking.
Godaddy Website not Showing on Google
Website hosting is also an integral part of website SEO and website speed. It is important to use a good reliable host with great customer service to help you through any issues that may arise.
Your web designer or website developer should be the best person to ask for advice as to which is the best hosting company to use.
Step One - Converting Website to WordPress
Why is my website not on Google – Unfortunately, there is no tool you can use to convert to WordPress automatically.
That’s the bad news but the good news is, WordPress allows you or you website designer or web developer to rebuild your website to almost exactly match the previous one.
You may be able to use your existing hosting to install wordpress. It is recommended that you build the new website on a subdomin or temporary domain and then transfer the files to the existing domain once complete.
Once you have WordPress installed and working, go to plugins and ‘add new’ within the WordPress dashboard and add an SEO plugin. The plugin will show you how to optimise each page and your whole website for extremely competitive SEO. You can target your local area as wellas nationally or globally depending on your type of business.
Here is a great video explaining WordPress SEO plugins.
More on plugins and there origin – you don’t have to read this part 🙂
In computing, a plug-in (or plugin, add-in, addin, add-on, or addon) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization.
A theme or skin is a preset package containing additional or changed graphical appearance details, achieved by the use of a graphical user interface (GUI).
That can be applied to specific software and websites to suit the purpose, topic, or tastes of different users to customize the look and feel of a piece of computer software or an operating system front-end GUI (and window managers).
The host application provides services which the plug-in can use, including a way for plug-ins to register themselves with the host application and a protocol for the exchange of data with plug-ins.
Plug-ins depend on the services provided by the host application and do not usually work by themselves.
Conversely, the host application operates independently of the plug-ins, making it possible for end-users to add and update plug-ins dynamically without needing to make changes to the host application.
Programmers typically implement plug-ins as shared libraries, which get dynamically loaded at run time.
HyperCard supported a similar facility, but more commonly included the plug-in code in the HyperCard documents (called stacks) themselves.
Thus the HyperCard stack became a self-contained application in its own right, distributable as a single entity that end-users could run without the need for additional installation-steps.
Programs may also implement plug-ins by loading a directory of simple script files written in a scripting language like Python or Lua.
In Mozilla Foundation definitions, the words “add-on”, “extension” and “plug-in” are not synonyms. “Add-on” can refer to anything that extends the functions of a Mozilla application.
Extensions comprise a subtype, albeit the most common and the most powerful one. Mozilla applications come with integrated add-on managers that, similar to package managers, install, update and manage extensions.
The term, “plug-in”, however, strictly refers to NPAPI-based web content renderers. Mozilla deprecated plug-ins for its products.
But UXP-based applications, like web browsers Pale Moon and Basilisk, keep supporting (NPAPI) plug-ins.
In the mid 1970s, the EDT text editor ran on the Unisys VS/9 operating system using the UNIVAC Series 90 mainframe computer.
It allowed a program from the editor and access the in-memory edit buffer.
The plug-in executable could call the editor to inspect and change the text.
The University of Waterloo Fortran compiler used this to allow interactive compilation of Fortran programs.
Early personal computer software with plug-in capability included HyperCard and QuarkXPress on the Apple Macintosh, both released in 1987.
In 1988, Silicon Beach Software included plug-in capability in Digital Darkroom and SuperPaint, and Ed Bomke coined the term plug-in.
Websites can be used in various fashions: a personal website, a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc.
Websites can be the work of an individual, a business or other organization, and are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the user, can be blurred.
Some websites require user registration or subscription to access content.
Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards, web-based email, social networking websites, websites providing real-time stock market data, as well as sites providing various other services.
While “web site” was the original spelling (sometimes capitalized “Web site”, since “Web” is a proper noun when referring to the World Wide Web), this variant has become rarely used, and “website” has become the standard spelling.
All major style guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook, have reflected this change.
Step Two - Optimise Website for Speed and What Will Happen With These Essential SEO Tools
Why is my website not on Google – Slow loading websites are frustrating. We all know this and Google do too. They have an acceptable time for a website to load and you can check this using their own tool as well as many others.
Here are a few examples of website speed tools that you can use to optimise you website speed:
Step Three - Submit Website to Google Search Console
Why is my website not on Google – Once your website is on reliable hosting, is built with WordPress and you have optimised your page content for SEO, and you have optimised the website speed, it is time to submit the website to Google.
You will need to have a Google account in order to do this.
Once you have your Google account, sign in and go to Search Console Tools.
Go to add a new property under the dropdown on the left and add your URL under URL prefeix.
Google will then ask you to verify that this is your website. This is a little complicated but if you have access to the server your website is stored on (ask your developer or the hosting company if you don’t understand this) you can upload a Google file and once done, click verify.
Your website is now submitted to Google and you can log into Search Console to access reports and website performance, as well as keeping an eye on any errors that might occur.
Step Four - Regularly Update Content
Why is my website not on Google – If there is one thing Google loves, it’s freshly updated content.
This can involve updating images, adding wording or creating new pages.
The best way though is to create a blog and regularly add posts and articles targetting a specific enquiry or long tail keyword (this is a keyword that consists of several words).
This process can be time consuming but it’s a great way to make your website relevant, constantly expanding and interesting to both Google’s search bots and potential new customers.
Step Five - Compare Your Results to your Competitors
Think about which searches you want to target. See what other people are searching for and keep an eye on how your competitors are performing for those searches and what you can do to get ahead of them.
Consider getting a website designer or developer for deeper SEO.
Never have to ask yourself ‘why is my website not on Google’ ever again!
A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the format that is sent to a client web browser.
It is primarily coded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to control appearance beyond basic HTML.
Images are commonly used to create the desired appearance and as part of the main content.
Audio or video might also be considered “static” content if it plays automatically or is generally non-interactive. This type of website usually displays the same information to all visitors.
Similar to handing out a printed brochure to customers or clients, a static website will generally provide consistent, standard information for an extended period of time.
Although the website owner may make updates periodically, it is a manual process to edit the text, photos, and other content and may require basic website design skills and software.
Simple forms or marketing examples of websites, such as classic website, a five-page website or a brochure website are often static websites, because they present pre-defined, static information to the user.
This may include information about a company and its products and services through text, photos, animations, audio/video, and navigation menus.
Static websites may still use server side includes (SSI) as an editing convenience, such as sharing a common menu bar across many pages. As the site’s behavior to the reader is still static, this is not considered a dynamic site.
A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes itself frequently and automatically. Server-side dynamic pages are generated “on the fly” by computer code that produces the HTML (CSS are responsible for appearance and thus, are static files).
There are a wide range of software systems, such as CGI, Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP), Active Server Pages and ColdFusion (CFML) that are available to generate dynamic web systems and dynamic sites.
Various web application frameworks and web template systems are available for general-use programming languages like Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby to make it faster and easier to create complex dynamic websites.
A site can display the current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalized to the requirements of the individual user.
For example, when the front page of a news site is requested, the code running on the webserver might combine stored HTML fragments with news stories retrieved from a database or another website via RSS to produce a page that includes the latest information.
Dynamic sites can be interactive by using HTML forms, storing and reading back browser cookies, or by creating a series of pages that reflect the previous history of clicks.
Another example of dynamic content is when a retail website with a database of media products allows a user to input a search request, e.g. for the keyword Beatles.
In response, the content of the web page will spontaneously change the way it looked before, and will then display a list of Beatles products like CDs, DVDs, and books.
Dynamic HTML uses JavaScript code to instruct the web browser how to interactively modify the page contents. One way to simulate a certain type of dynamic website while avoiding the performance loss of initiating the dynamic engine on a per-user or per-connection basis is to periodically automatically regenerate a large series of static pages.
Early websites had only text, and soon after, images. Web browser plug-ins were then used to add audio, video, and interactivity (such as for a rich web application that mirrors the complexity of a desktop application like a word processor).
Examples of such plug-ins are Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Shockwave Player, and Java SE. HTML 5 includes provisions for audio and video without plugins.
JavaScript is also built into most modern web browsers, and allows for website creators to send code to the web browser that instructs it how to interactively modify page content and communicate with the web server if needed.
The browser’s internal representation of the content is known as the Document Object Model (DOM).
WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is a modern JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics without the use of plug-ins.
It allows interactive content such as 3D animations, visualizations and video explainers to presented users in the most intuitive way.
A 2010-era trend in websites called “responsive design” has given the best viewing experience as it provides a device based layout for users.
These websites change their layout according to the device or mobile platform, thus giving a rich user experience.