In this day and age, the significance of online presence and branding cannot be emphasized enough. Businesses have to be online. While it may not seem like an urgent need, a business that is online is a service provider that is accessible. A business with a physical store, for example, caters to a fixed location, but a business with a website is one that makes itself available to a larger audience. Online presence can be grown organically, but it can also be structured in a systematic and strategic manner.

High-quality and affordable SEO services in the Philippines is something that we can help your business out with. Feel free to reach out to us, and let us know what are the challenges keeping you from building your online presence. For the skeptics, one can only truly comprehend the significance of a website and online presence once their business has had one.

As a business owner, the capacity to provide a platform for all your products and services — with all the important information that only you can narrate to your audience — is indispensable. Having a website for your business enables you to market directly to your target buyers. For any limited-time promos, holiday discounts, new products or changes in pricing, your website can help spread information about your business. This also adds to your credibility as a brand and a legitimate business, as your website takes up digital real estate that your customers can directly visit.

The problem, however, is having a website that is not accessible. Imagine owning a physical store located in a far flung area, away from the city, where the roads are not even cemented, and there is barely any foot traffic. This isolated store can be compared to a business website that is not ranking.

On SERPs: First Page or It Doesn’t Matter

Is it not true that whenever we do our own searches, the chances of us checking beyond the first page is slim to none. If anything, we limit our clicks to the top results after reading the metadata. That being said, if it’s your business, it’s either that your page is part of the top ten results, or it isn’t that impactful.

Content Issues

Here are some reasons for your website not ranking, and what you can do to address these problems:When there is something wrong with your content, searchability can become an issue. Having duplicate content on your website is taking away from your SEO efforts. Imagine having a glass full of juice — this rank juice is your content converted, and the glass is the web page that serves as the vessel. Having two pages with the same content reduces the amount of juice you can offer, since all that juice has to be divided between two glasses. Instead of ranking higher with all that SEO juice in one page, your page ends up underperforming in the SERPs, because Google’s crawlers cannot ascertain which of the duplicate pages to list.

There are tools available online to check for duplicate or plagiarized content. When you find these pages, use the rel=canonical tag to direct Google towards the page that it should attribute all SEO juice to, effectively canonicalizing it.

Another ranking issue is not having anything substantial to say through your on-page content. If your competitors have well-written blogs with a word count greater than a thousand words, while your blogs, on the other hand, are too thin (at around 300-350 words), then that may be a reason these other pages are ranking better in SERPs. Remember that these rankings are vetted according to relevance, among other things. As the old adage goes: “Content is King.”

That being said, having long-form articles on your website can only be as effective if you’re doing it on a consistent basis. A business that publishes informative and helpful blogs on its website with frequency creates more website traffic, and this enables more opportunities for users to find their way to your business. Creating a content calendar and scheduling posts is one way to build your online presence and improve your SEO.

Get GMB-registered

If you intend to improve your search rankings, then it is a must that your business be registered on Google My Business. Since Google prioritizes delivering fast and relevant search results, businesses that are available on GMB provides them more reliable info to relay to users. Especially for businesses targeting a locality, having the pertinent info, such as your business address, a list of products and services, and target demographic, can help with your ranking efforts.

Do You Have a Mobile-friendly Website?

Always bear in mind that it is Google’s goal to provide users the best search experience that they can offer. With this as a given, a website that takes too long to load, is unresponsive, or not mobile-friendly can be a reason for low rankings. Data shows that 30 percent of web pages that turn up on the first page of desktop searches are not showing up in the top ten of mobile search results. Can you imagine the reach your business could have had if your website worked perfectly on mobile? As of June 2019, mobile searches accounted for 51 percent, while desktop searches accounted for 45.5 percent.

Check if your website is mobile-friendly. If it isn’t yet, then it’s about time for you to choose a befitting WordPress theme that addresses device compatibility.

We’ve Got You Covered: Leave Your SEO Needs (and more!) to New Age Digital

There are other causes for a website to perform poorly on SERPs, or for these pages to not rank at all. Apart from a site’s content concerns; such as having duplicate content scattered across several pages, useless blogs that serve as fodder, or inconsistent posting, not being registered on GMB, or not being mobile-friendly, are reasons for Google to think of your website as irrelevant to the user. Your business website not being indexed is one other reason, too. Bad link-building practices like utilizing a PBN, such as those practiced by black-hat SEO agencies, are prone to algorithmic penalties by Google. Among many others, these are just a few reasons for any business owner to seek expert advice.

If your website isn’t ranking, and you have no idea what to do, then try consulting with us. We’re more than willing to help you and your business succeed through what we do best: SEO and digital marketing. Contact us today!