Blog - Toronto Web Design Company

Nov 21 2020

9 Reasons Your Website Doesn’t Rank On Google

Have you been patiently waiting to see your search engine result listing appear for a keyword search? SEO and website design can be a time consuming task when you don’t know what to look for. Learn about some of the most common reasons your website doesn’t rank on Google to eliminate the problems you already or simply avoid them altogether.

You chose the wrong keywords

Not all keywords are what they seem. Just because your website sells hair curlers and women’s beauty products doesn’t mean those are the actual keywords you should target. When competitors like Walmart, Amazon and Aliexpress dominate those keywords you have to pursue more realistic search terms to get on the first page of Google.

Keywords (written with scrabble pieces) is a reason you may not rank on Google

Keyword research is required for an accurate picture of the competitive landscape and to identify what’s needed to get your website on the first page of search results.

Apart from identifying high volume, high converting search terms, keyword research means completing a thorough competitive analysis. This provides valuable insight into your website’s ranking ability and how it competes against the top 10 organic results.

Keyword research gives you an idea of how many backlinks your website would need to compete with the top websites. You reverse engineer how your competition has achieved a top ranking so that you’re able to match and beat the status quo.

With no research, you’re blindly competing for a term without knowing whether your efforts are moving you closer to the top of the first page. Your initial assessment of the keywords you target will layout the blueprint and establish a strategy that gets you to the first page of results.

Using the wrong anchor text backlinks

The text you use to link to your pages can have a very large impact on your search visibility. Search engines will consider the text of a link as a way of establishing contextual meaning to the page.

The correct use of exact match anchor text will enhance your optimization for a specific search term. For example, if you’ve published an article on link building, then linking to the page with the term link building will tell search engines “Hey, this page is on link building”

The problems that people encounter with exact match anchor text is that you can easily over-optimize depending on the situation. If your domain is linkbuilding.com and you write an article on link building published as linkbuilding.com/link-building/ then you’re already over-optimized.

Adding the exact match anchor text link building could send your site way back in the search results with each additional exact match link working against your efforts to rank the page.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, you may be under-optimized if you don’t use enough exact match anchor text. If your keyword is not in the URL, or title then you would opt to use exact match anchor text to influence a rank for the term.

You can use the exact match anchor text a few times before over-optimizing your link building strategy. The best practice is to vary your anchor text between, exact match, long tail, brand, naked URL and un-optimized anchor text.

Finding the right balance between the types of anchor text links you use is part of understanding the strength of your on-page optimization, what has been established in the SERP already and how your website ranking responds to the links you send it.

Content is too thin

There’s a lot of discussion about word count when it comes to a first-page ranking. What you’ll find in many articles is that the more words you have, the better your page ranks. The stat that floats around is that the average word count of a number one ranking page is 1890 words.

Chart showing the average word count for top ten ranked pages

The argument is that Google ranks by keyword topic, so if your page can adequately satisfy the intent of the search it shouldn’t matter how many words you have. It happens all the time where pages outrank the competition with fewer words.

One practice that everyone can agree on is that a page should at the very minimum have over 200 words. How much context could you possibly provide in less than that? Even if it is a service page or something similar, publish over 200 words to provide accurate context.

Stay away from achieving the bare minimum. The movement that we’ve seen on the internet as a whole is that the more useful content you can provide, the more traffic you drive because more search terms are ranking.

Websites that have a library of resources published will always drive more traffic than those without.

If you don’t have too many pages on your site, search engines may view your site as having thin content, allowing others to outrank you.

You copied content without canonical tags

You can copy or republish content on your website, but only if you add the canonical tag to your page. This tells search engines that your page is not the original version and gives search engines the URL of where the content was first published.

News sites do this all the time without penalty.

However, if you copy content that has already been published without canonical tags your site will receive an algorithmic penalty. These setbacks in search visibility are essentially filters in the search algorithm designed to keep people honest and protect original content.

You can’t rank on Google by publishing duplicate content.

The more duplicate content found on your website, the more severe the algorithmic penalty. If you actively re-publish other website’s content, be sure to add the “rel=canonical” tag to your page.

Your pages aren’t indexed

Are you looking for your pages to rank on Google for a keyword when they’re not even on Google’s index?! You can check to see whether your pages are appearing on Google by using the site: search command.

Enter site:yourdomiain.com + [your page title] to see if your page is on Google’s index. If you don’t see the page that you’ve published in the search results it isn’t indexed on Google.

Your site receives alerts from Google regarding manual actions which could be a reason why your site doesn't appear on Google

Check the search console to see whether you’ve been issued a manual penalty. If not, go to the page itself and see whether you’ve accidentally marked it noindex. If so, uncheck the option.

You should probably check your robots.txt file as well to see if there’s a command that excludes your page from being crawled by search engines.

If you have no internal links pointing to your page, link to it from other related content on your website. Submit a new sitemap and you should be good to go.

Check back in a few days using the site:search function to give Google some time to index your page(s).

Too many broken links

A well-optimized page is one that provides an enjoyable user experience. Anything that undermines that experience is said to also negatively affect your overall website performance.

When users click on broken links, it’s considered to be a negative experience. They are forced to back up and reconsider where it is they would like to go next.

This experience may cause feelings of disappointment, discouragement and demonstrate a lack of professionalism on behalf of your company. It’s fair to say that there’s nothing good about broken links on your website.

If you have too many broken links, it’s harder to rank on Google in the top positions. Make sure the links that break on your site are fixed promptly to avoid providing a poor user experience for users.

Not enough quality backlinks

It is next to impossible to rank on Google for the number one position without acquiring quality backlinks. To clarify, if your website is an established authority website, your page may have enough authority from the links you’ve acquired on your domain as a whole.

If you’re not ranking on the first page, there’s a good chance you don’t have enough quality backlinks. High-quality links are those that come from credible websites, related content and improve the user experience when going from one page to the other.

Treat your backlinks as votes of credibility. Gain as many votes of confidence in your content from websites that have a good standing. Quality backlinks will fuel your ranking ability in every situation.

Under-optimized metadata

When search engines assess, categorize and rank web pages, the metadata you provide them with plays a big role in what keywords they consider your content to be relevant for in a search. If you want to rank for a half-decent keyword, your page needs to be optimized to do so.

If you want to rank for snowboards, but your title and URL have snow skis instead, you’re never going to see your page rank for that keyword.

Make sure your page is optimized for search engines and users by placing your keyword in the title, URL, image alt tags and few times within the body of content.

Getting your basic on-page optimization correct will communicate the keyword that best describes your page.

Haven’t satisfied search intent

The ability to provide a user with exactly what they’re looking for when searching a keyword is considered the ability to satisfy search (or user) intent. Even if you’re able to get the best links and have volumes of content published your page may not rank on Google if it misses the mark on the true intent of a keyword search.

For example, if you type the word running shoes into a search, the results will show it is a keyword that implies transactional intent. Users who type this keyword are most interested in buying running shoes.

search results for keyword "running shoes" shows transactional intent

Even if you write a 5000-word article on running shoes and get the best links for your content, the page will never rank for this term. Search engines know that people don’t want to read about running shoes, they want to buy them.

There are instances where you might even get your page to rank on Google within the top 10, but your ranking will eventually drop when people aren’t spending any time on your page. Rankbrain is programmed to identify when users aren’t engaging with content. It’s part of how Google can produce accurate and relevant results.

Make sure that your content matches the same intent as what’s being shown on the first page of results. If you’ve missed the mark on intent, you won’t ever rank for your keyword.

Rank on the first page Google consistently

It’s easy to get your pages to move up in rank when you understand what tactics will move the needle. Most efforts to enhance search engine optimization are logical efforts that help users and create better quality results.

Put users at the top of your priority list as a start, and make the improvements to your page that will benefit them the most. Creating content that is at the same level or better than what’s on the first page is your first area of attack.

A strong analysis of what’s working to rank a page for a keyword is one of the most powerful assets you can have when it comes to getting your content out in front of your competition.

Satisfy search intent and get a bunch of credible websites to vouch for your content and you’ll see the results of your efforts, all technical aspects aside. Keep in mind, SEO requires you to play the long game, so be patient, analytical and proactive to see an increase in your website traffic, leads and new clients when you site ranks on Google.

Oct 30 2020

Why Consider SEO During Website Design?

You know it to be true, but you can’t quite explain it. SEO and website design seem to be completely different, and yet they are completely intertwined. The truth is, you can’t have one without the other and you need to consider SEO during website design.

SEO is the way to get people to your website. Web design is the way to keep them there. Considering there are so many different factors that can affect a website’s SEO, you can’t build a website without considering SEO. There are too many critical issues that you can make sure to swing your way rather than having to go back and correct them at a much higher cost.

When you understand the underlying principles of each major relationship you can prepare your website and optimization from the very start. Here are 4 reasons to consider SEO during your website design.

Keywords form your website structure

It may seem presumptuous to think that you’re going to need to have a keyword strategy before you build a website, however, the truth is you need to know your keywords in order to structure your content and on-page optimization.

This is especially true for local businesses. Creating your page with the keyword in the URL is a way to create hyper-local content. If the city or location is in your URL, it’s pretty much decided that the content is targeting that specific location.

Using keywords in the initial planning of your pages creates the competitive advantage you need in terms of on-page optimization. If you have an established keyword strategy, you know exactly how to optimize your pages.

A keyword strategy also provides the skeleton for your website. You can create a tentative content strategy that includes your major pillar pages and the blog content that will help support the depth of your website.

Page speed

The page speed can affect the decision you make in designing your website. Rather than using images that take up large files, choose to create images that load quickly to reduce the time it takes until the first contentful paint.

Page speed plays a big role in the user experience. Many ranking factors are based on the user experience. This makes page speed a big part of your website’s design.

Slow page speed ultimately costs you revenue

Studies have shown that when a page loads slowly, it loses a percentage of its visitors. People are super impatient so when the 3-second mark hits, you’re going to see a larger percentage of your traffic back off of your website.

The bounce rate charts of how they relate to each industry is important to consider in your SEO and website design

The number of people that land on your page and back out, divided by the total number that land on your page will give you what’s called the Bounce Rate.

Here is a chart showing the inverse relationship between bounce rate and page speed.

As page speed increases, you lose less visitors on your website. As page speed decreases, more people will leave your site before they even see your content.

Why is page speed an SEO issue?

Rankbrain is Google’s artificial intelligence program that is used to rank websites. Rankbrain bases its decision according to hundreds of ranking factors, some of which are weighted more heavily than others depending on the niche.

In almost every situation, user engagement plays a relatively large role in determining the popularity of a website on the first page of results.

For example, Rankbrain will measure the average length of time that a user spends on a page. If for some reason Page A average 5 minutes while Page B and Page C are both under 2 minutes, Page A will receive a bump towards ranking higher.

This is only one ranking factor among hundreds, but remember that search engines want to feature the best possible results to a query.

It would seem users are really enjoying Page A because they spend the most time on it, so Page A would get the top placement in the search results.

Another user engagement statistic is click-through rate. When Page A is expected to get X amount of clicks in the 4^th position in the search results and Page A receives X +30 clicks, Page A may move up in the rank.

If Page B in the third position received X -30 clicks, it would mandate that Page A take Page B’s position in the SERP. Again, these are isolated comparisons because they aren’t deciding factors on their own. They are simply indications of user engagement.

If a user lands on a page that doesn’t have any of the information they want, they will immediately back out and look for another website. This contributes to the bounce rate and search engines will start to note whether most users are landing on the page and doing the same for a specific keyword search.

If every user lands on a page and immediately backs out, the page is obviously not able to answer the users intent for the search. This page will eventually stop being shown to users for that keyword.

Slow page speed contributes to poor user engagement. The more people that seem to back off your page, the more it seems like people don’t like what they’re finding.

Increasing page speed will reduce the bounce rate, and contribute to positive ranking signals. This is why page speed is an SEO issue.

Why is page speed a web design issue?

Page speed is a web design issue because web designers are in control of the scripts and clutter that can impede a page when it’s loading.

Web designers have access to the page from ground zero to make sure that the images aren’t weighing down the server response time.

Web designers can make sure that the images are exactly the dimensions needed to fulfil what’s required for the page to look good.

Publish optimized pages from day one

SEO needs to be incorporated with web design from day one, otherwise there’s double the work being done. Why not ensure the on-page elements are present when the pages are published for the first time?

It’s more costly to pay a web designer to come up with a finished product, only to have an SEO go back and change on-page elements to get to the actual finished product.

Images

It’s already been made apparent how important page speed is and how images can affect page speed. What’s more, is that images can be uploaded with descriptive filenames to enhance on-page optimization. They also need to have the alt tags filled out with where the target keyword is included in the description.

Metadata

Titles and subtitles with H1-H6 tags and URLs should all include the target keyword or their synonyms. Each item of metadata is important to highlighting the target keyword and improving the on-page optimization for better placement in the search results.

Structured data markup

Schema.org is the language that search engines share to categorize entities. Schema can be implemented using structured data markup. This contributes to a clearer understanding of how to categorize a page and highlights the most important information in the content.

SEO optimized content

Search engines rank web pages based on the content that’s on the page. Many web designers are only concerned with aesthetics and won’t know exactly how to create content that satisfies search intent.

Every page needs content to rank, which is why it’s important to have an SEO professional contributing to the planning phase of building a website. An SEO consultant can identify the underlying search intent and the content required to get the most results.

Mobile-friendliness

All websites are now indexed using the mobile version of the website. More than 50% of searches are made using mobile devices, making the demand for a responsive website a very serious issue.

What’s more is if your website doesn’t function well on a mobile device, it’s going to cost you some search visibility depending on where users are searching from.

This is a design issue for obvious reasons. All websites need to alter the layout based on the size of the screen. There are a bunch of different screen sizes to cover so having a good understanding of how to manipulate the navigation and buttons becomes critical.

So critical in fact, that Google has dedicated a page to test your mobile-friendliness. If your website doesn’t pass this test, you can bet you’re seeing a reduction in search visibility on mobile devices.

SEO and web design need to work together

The need for SEO in web design is just as important as the need for web design in SEO. As major search engines look to integrate more user engagement metrics in the ranking algorithm, both aspects of digital marketing become more and more dependent on each other.

To give your website the best chance of driving traffic in the least amount of time, you need to consider SEO in your website design. In order to maintain those rankings, you’ll need to consider your website’s design and how well it engages your audience.

One without the other makes for a broken system. Consider SEO during website design-preferably at the earliest stages of your websites development to save you more money, time and resources.

Oct 28 2020

7 Ways To Drive Traffic to Your Website (Without Knowing Too Much About SEO)

When you’re developing a new website it’s hard to see any short-term wins when most marketing tactics are long-term strategies. The problem is it takes time to get the ball rolling and effectively drive traffic to your website.

At the end of the day, marketing is really about getting the word out about your company and product. You don’t need to wait for articles to rank to see some quick results when there are alternative means of getting your traffic sales going.

Some tactics may require you to shell out a few bucks while others I’m about to list are absolutely free. Read on about some creative ways you can drive traffic without needing to know too much about SEO.

Leave comments on popular websites

The first tip is to comment on really popular websites with an enormous amount of traffic. When websites with huge followings publish an article they can get hundreds of thousands of people reading these articles in a short period of time.

Drive traffic by commenting on popular blogs (this image shows the organic traffic for backlinko article)

You can capitalize on their subscribership by being among the first to comment on an article. Most comments allow you to link the URL of your website from your name.

Avoid shallow comments like “Great post! Keep ’em comin!” These types of comments will not get you noticed.

Example of ineffective comment for driving traffic to your website

Try to give an insightful comment that actually holds some value.

Thanks, Brian for all your hard work on this topic. I find that a lot of what you publish works for you because of your reputation and authority. For smaller website owners, it’s much more difficult to get companies to link to our content because they’ve never heard of us before.
It doesn’t matter how extensive and in-depth our ultimate guide is on any given topic-people aren’t going to care as much. Broken link building gives us that spark that we need to attract a little more responses from companies that we’re reaching out to through email.
It also helps to attempt to contact the people you’re about to pitch to or ask for a link beforehand on social media. Even comment on one of their posts or articles they’ve recently published. It’s the only way to break the ice before in order to get noticed and increases the likelihood of a response
Christian Carere

This comment is insightful and is written from experience on link building through outreach.

People will relate to it and find value in the message that’s being offered. Of the thousands of people that end up reading the article with your comment on it, you will get a percentage of that traffic, if your comment is insightful enough to warrant someone clicking on your name.

With a one-sentence comment, people won’t even know you exist.

Be sure to choose websites that are within your niche and have a lot of organic traffic flowing through its pages.

Seek out Instagram influencers

Have you ever wondered how the Kardashians make so much money? They are massive influencers on social media.

With 199 million followers, one post from Kylie Jenner about a product and those products sales are through the roof.

Kylie Jenner instagram homepage as example of how influencers drive sales through increased traffic

It’s no secret that you can pay Influencers to mention your product in a post.

If you’re seeking out influencers that have a million followers, it’s going to get expensive pretty quick.

In fact, even if those influencers have 100,000 followers, you’ll be paying quite a bit of money from the get-go.

The secret is to look for micro-influencers who have 10-17k followers. For a few hundred bucks you can get them to post a story about your product.

An Instagram story allows viewers to swipe up and go directly to your website. This option is also cheaper than a post because stories disappear after 24 hours.

This is a measurable strategy to drive traffic because you can get good data on the effects of every campaign you run. Since the story is only 24 hours you can see the direct impact that your influencer is having on your product sales and website traffic.

Invite guest authors

Without going too deep into how “content is king” let’s start by just accepting that fact and consider that in order to get the best content, you might need to pay some decent writers.

You can advertise guest posts by publishing a “write for us page”, but if your blog isn’t big enough to attract really good writers, the truth is you’re going to get a lot of low-quality pitches and submissions.

A sample of a write for us page to attract guest authors

Invite writers who have experience in writing in your niche and have published articles on your topics in the past year. You can offer to pay for every 500 words and ask for articles anywhere from 1500-3000 words.

One of the key hiring criteria is that you’ll want your writers to have a high number of followers in their social network. The idea is that they share their articles with their network when each article goes live.

This gets your website in front of a lot of new faces every time a new writer is hired which can drive traffic when they publish content on your website. You can keep this tactic going for as long as you want to keep building your audience.

This tactic develops your social media network and increases the traffic to your site.

More traffic to high-quality content usually means more backlinks so you can expect your domain authority to rise as well as the value of being a writer on your blog.

Once your website has enough traffic and domain authority you won’t need to pay guest authors to publish content on your site-they’ll be asking you for the privilege of writing for your blog.

Find affiliates

Affiliate marketing can get your products in front of a huge audience if you’re set up to do it well. Rather than go through the whole setup of listing your product on an affiliate network and trying to get affiliates to pick it up-go straight to the source of traffic.

Piggyback off of your competitors to find affiliates who are already promoting their product. For example, type into Google:

[your competitors name] vs.

You should see a number of options in the drop-down menu. Search for these comparisons to find articles that have already been written by affiliates.

Google autosuggest example showing "competitor vs" (in this example its Ahrefs) search to find affiliate articles

Rather than setting up an entire affiliate campaign, offer to pay the author to insert your product within the article.

Or better yet, pay them to write a new article comparing your product with the most well-known competitor in your niche.

You might be wondering “Why help my competition?”

It’s true, you may be conceding some sales to your competition with this method, however, you’re also gaining more search visibility at their expense because there are already people searching for comparison articles on their product.

By going directly to the affiliates, they get to make more money and you get the luxury of using their traffic to your advantage.

Be a Twitter helper

One tactic that has proven successful in the content you publish on your site is to try to help people above and beyond what anyone else would do. When you’re genuinely making an effort to help people with their issues, people will genuinely want to help you in return.

Use Twitter to find people tweeting about the various aspects of problems that your product solves. Rather than tell them about your product, tell them how to solve their problem without promoting yourself in the slightest.

It’s a noticeable trait to be genuinely engaged in providing free advice and consultation. When people see how much you’re giving without taking it comes full circle.

This strategy isn’t a short term strategy, but it will pay off when you least expect it. The whole point is to do this without expecting a payoff.

The perspective of being of service needs to be genuine, to begin with, so if you’re counting your tweets and the number of times you’ve helped people, you’re going to get salty if there’s no immediate return.

Help people unconditionally in order to establish a reputation as someone who cares about their clients and knows their industry inside out.

Offer tools and scripts

People love free tools-especially when they’re useful for accomplishing common tasks they couldn’t do otherwise. Free tools are an excellent way to drive traffic and build long-term backlinks from people who find your tool useful.

You might be thinking “I’m not a programmer and I don’t have money to invest in a tool”

No problem.

Go to Code Canyon for a list of tools you can pick up for literally next to nothing. This website offers scripts and codes you can install on your site to provide visitors with free tools.

Obviously, the more involved the tool is, the more you’ll need to pay. But installing something like a mortgage calculator can literally cost you less than five bucks.

The effect of having one on your real estate website will land you thousands of extra visitors and backlinks.

Just look at the traffic and backlinks for Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker.

Ubersuggest is absolutely crushing it.

Ubersuggest shows even more traffic and backlinks for their free tool

Offer a free tool that’s worth using for more backlinks and visitors to your website.

Join a social group

Seek comfort in the masses. Look for groups on social media that share quality information and can help network your business.

You can find a group on Facebook in just about any type of niche.

Avoid groups that have millions of members. It will be too hard to get noticed and they tend to be more spammy.

Stick to groups that are more private with at least 1000 members. If you’re a new member, don’t promote your business at all within the first 10 posts or comments you make.

Your first impression should be made with quality comments and insightful posts that aren’t promotional.

As you gain a little more credibility, you can then drop links to your website when it’s appropriate and will help in explaining a point.

Share members’ posts on your social network and they will do the same for you.

Be social, engaging and interact with your members on a level that’s social as opposed to promotional. Being genuine and a real live human being tends to more effective than a content posting robot when it comes to being able to drive traffic.

Stay consistent with your efforts

Every strategy mentioned will work to drive traffic to your website. If you can commit to making the efforts required to execute these tactics consistently for a 12 week period, you will see the difference in the number of visitors that are landing on your site. For a no-obligation consultation on your website, feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Related reading: Why Consider SEO During Website Design?