By John Eberhard
I hear this one constantly. Someone gets on the phone with me, sounding a little wounded, and says: “I searched for my own business and I couldn’t find myself. What’s going on?”
Nine times out of ten, nothing is “going on.” Google isn’t punishing you. There’s no secret penalty box for businesses it doesn’t like. What’s actually happening is usually a lot more boring, and a lot more fixable, than people assume.
You’re new, and Google doesn’t trust new
If your website launched three months ago, Google is still sizing you up. Search engines give weight to sites that have been around, have earned links, and have a track record of not being spammy nonsense. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just risk management on Google’s part. There’s no shortcut around this one. Time in the game matters, and I’ve never seen a “hack” that reliably replaces it.
Your competition is simply better established
Sometimes the honest answer is: you’re in a market where everybody else has been doing SEO for ten years, and you started last month (or you’ve never done any SEO actions). If you’re a personal injury attorney or a real estate agent or a dentist in a big metro area, you are wrestling with firms that have spent small fortunes and a decade of effort building their search engine visibility. That’s not a Google problem, that’s a “you’re in a genuinely competitive field” problem, and it needs to be treated accordingly — with patience, and with a strategy that plays to a smaller player’s strengths rather than trying to outspend the giants.
Your site has technical issues Google can’t get past
This is the more mechanical stuff: pages that take forever to load, broken links, duplicate content, missing title tags, images with no alt text, a sitemap that was never submitted, or a robots.txt file blocking search engines by accident (yes, this happens more than you’d think, usually left over from when a developer built the site and forgot to flip the switch when it went live). None of this is glamorous work. It’s not going to make headlines. But it’s often the difference between a site Google can properly crawl and index, and one it’s essentially guessing about.
You haven’t given Google a reason to rank you
This is the one nobody wants to hear, because it takes actual effort: content. Not “content” in the vague marketing-buzzword sense, but genuinely useful pages that answer the specific questions your customers are asking. If your entire website consists of a homepage, an about page, and a contact form, or worse – it’s all just on one page, you’ve given Google almost nothing to work with. Compare that to a competitor who’s published fifty articles addressing real customer questions over the last five years. It’s not close.
You’re trying to rank for keywords that are too competitive
If you’re trying to rank for keywords like “dentist” or “attorney” or “contractor,” I’m sorry to tell you that it’s just not going to happen. Those short, general type of keywords are too competitive, and the guys who have been working on their SEO for decades are going to leave you in the dust. You need to find relevant keywords, including what we call long tail keywords, that do not have as many sites competing for them. And work on getting your site to rank for those.
Your site has hardly any links to it
This has been and remains today one of the most important criteria for how search engines rank sites for any given keywords. If your site has 25 links to it coming from other websites, you’re not going to be able to compete with sites with 5,000 links. Or 10,000. Or 25,000. You get the idea.
You need to start building up links to your site. One of the best ways to do this is to write press releases on your company activities, including a link to your site, and submit those to online press release sites, some free, some paid. And you need to do this consistently over a period of time.
What I’d actually do about it
Start by getting honest data instead of gut feelings, like how many links you have to your site, what keywords you’re ranking for and how high you’re ranking, and how much traffic you’re getting from organic search engine searches. Then fix the technical basics, because there’s no point building a house on a cracked foundation. After that, it comes down to the unglamorous, compounding work: publishing content that solves real problems for real people, earning legitimate links, and being patient enough to let time do part of the job for you.
Here’s my honest, slightly cynical take after nearly two decades of doing this: there’s no trick that replaces relevance, trust, and time. I see marketers out there every year claiming they’ve cracked some new code, that the “old rules” don’t apply anymore. Some tactics do change. The fundamentals never do. Google is trying to serve up the most useful, trustworthy answer to somebody’s question. Your job is to actually be that answer — and to make sure Google can tell.
That’s it. No magic. Just the work.
Get a free consultation on improving your rankings on search engines. Contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
