Everybody wants to see their page hit the number one spot for their target keywords. In reality, even the best digital marketing agencies in the world canโt guarantee that will happen any of the time, let alone all of the time. On the other hand, your pages should be able to achieve consistently decent rankings. If theyโre not, here are some points you should check.
Has Your Page Actually Been Indexed?
Fire up your choice of search engine and look for โsite: yourdomainโ. This will show you a list of the pages which have been indexed. A page will only show up in searches if itโs on this list. If a page isnโt on this list, then the first point to check is when it was created.
Sadly, there is no rule about how long the search engines need to index content. As a rule of thumb, however, you should expect a page to be indexed within about 6 weeks. After this, check if you have accidentally flagged the page not to be indexed. If so, then remove the flag.
Then double-check to make sure that the page you want to be indexed can be reached by a direct path from your home screen. Itโs absolutely fine if this path involves multiple clicks but it needs to be there. Once youโre happy about both these points, try requesting your page to be indexed.
Keep in mind that this is a request, not an instruction. The search engines do not guarantee to index every page on the internet. In general, however, they will at least check a page if you actively request it. You may, however, still need to wait a while for them to do it.
Is Your Technical SEO Up to Standard?
Technical SEO is basically what determines the usability of a website. There are numerous elements to it. In the context of page-ranking, however, three stand out in particular. These are security, page-load speed and crawler-friendliness.
Security and page-load speed are both largely determined by a combination of your web design and your hosting. Crawler-friendliness is largely determined by your web design and your use of formatting. For example, have you provided meta descriptions, do you use headings appropriately, are there alt tags for images
If your technical SEO is below standard then you will almost certainly struggle to get your content to rank, no matter how good it is.
Are You Using the Right Strategy?
If everything so far has come up clean but youโre still struggling to get traction, then you need to rethink your approach. This can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially if youโve invested a lot of time and effort into creating your content. It is, however, better to acknowledge reality and go back to the drawing board early than to try to struggle on and hope things improve.
The harsh truth of the matter is that hope is not a strategy and strategy is what you need to find a way forward that works for you. On the plus side, thereโs a very strong chance you wonโt need to start again from scratch. You may just need to fine-tune what you already have to make it more effective.