Lost Your Ranking On Search Engines? What You Need To Know To Fix It

Posted on Oct 28 2014 - 10:57pm by Editorial Staff

SEO

Building your business online has never been tougher. There are so many businesses fighting for attention on the web it can be really tough to be heard above all the noise. The best way to be seen is to rank in the top 10 results in a search engine result. Achieving this is tough. If you are not prepared to pay for an ad, and want to sit on the front page through natural search, there are a few things you need to do.

Your website is your customer facing representative. Every word and image will be scrutinised by a reader to determine your honesty, professionalism and security. Tougher scrutiny comes from the search engine bots and algorithms that determine if your site is worthy of a top listing in results.

They may have come to you to buy something, but every customer is going to want information. You need to provide it. Writing articles relevant to your product or service is essential for adding depth and layers to your website. You may need to refer customers to third party websites for more information. Having links on the pages to good quality and relevant websites helps to improve your ranking.

However, if you are filling your pages with poor quality pages and poor links, you may actually be penalised by search engines like Google. Their algorithms can identify lazy web content such as non-human generated content, hidden text or links, and irrelevant keywords. Google have the power to make your website disappear from sight on the results page, and this can be difficult to come back from.

If you have suffered a ‘Google Penalty’ that is having a negative impact on your search results, you may need to address your entire website to find the reasons why. Blog rolling or buying links will almost always get you caught, so if you have done this, you may need to delete these pages and replace them with good quality content. Being time and cost efficient is essential in any business but cheating through black-hat SEO is lazy and unprofessional.

There are companies that provide Google penalty recovery services by investigating your website thoroughly. They help you come up with strategies to repair the damage. Have you employed an SEO company for this website before? If you have, ask them why they think Google may have placed a penalty on the site. You are going to need to conduct a full link audit which will take up your valuable time. If the SEO company was responsible, they should fix the problem.

Hopefully, you won’t need to take down your entire site and start afresh with a brand new domain name, but it has been known to happen. Without the help of search engines, our companies may never be discovered by new customers browsing the web. It is essential our websites meet the criteria for a good site as laid out by Google. Without a good quality website, we would be unlikely to impress a prospective customer enough to buy anything from us, whatever our business.

Credit: Paloma Gómez/Flickr

About the Author

Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.