Our Q & A page outlines the most common questions about web design, online presence, and more.
For example, why can’t I find my website on Google?
This is the most challenging question to answer without a thorough website analysis. However, the most common mistakes we see are:
- The website may not be designed correctly.
- The website is not indexed correctly with Google or any other search engine.
- Lack of content.
- No sitemap has been submitted to the search engines.
- The website is built using a website builder, making it difficult for Google to crawl and read the code.
- No links to drive traffic to your website.
- If your website was indexed correctly, but no, it can’t be found on Google, then maybe there is a technical error, or the site could have been injected with phishing files causing Google to remove the site from their index.
These are only a summary of the most common errors we see.
Why is my website not on the first page of a Google search result?
While your site may be found in a Google search, it may be on the second page or even further back.
- Typically, not enough links to drive traffic to your site.
- Lack of quality content. Content does NOT include images. Images do not give search engines or consumers information. Google and other search engines need text or words to read and know how to index. If you can’t cut and paste it, it is probably useless information to search engines.
- If your website load time is slow, it can damage your rankings in search results. A commonly overlooked SEO issue is hosting. Hosting has been turned into a commodity, but it can help or hurt your rankings. Cheap hosting is probably slow and held on a “shared” server, with hundreds of other websites sharing the same IP address.
- If you have not enhanced or added to your content, your website crawl rate might be low and considered an irrelevant site.
- Again, these are the most common mistakes, but many other options to consider.
- We recommend a Free Website Scan, which will outline multiple pages of tests and comments about fundamental issues and whether they need improvement or not.
Why can’t customers find my business on Google Maps?
- To be found in local search results, your business must have a claimed Google My Business (GMB), and all information should be up-to-date. Many companies and web designers miss that Google gives a free web page for your business in GMB that can be used as your website and a custom domain name. Additionally, with GMB, you can add events, posts, and more to keep your customer informed with information and content that will show on your business listing. Most web designers don’t know this, and those who don’t want to tell you because they are afraid you won’t need their services.
- You must also verify your business listing in Bing and Apple Maps to be found. In addition, you can subscribe to services that manage your online directory listings to ensure the best SEO strategies are being used.
How do I get my website to load faster to improve my SEO?
Website speed is a significant factor in search result rankings. This is because Google wants to give their customer a good experience, and they have studies that show that slow-loading websites lose traffic fast. Therefore, they do not highly rank sites that load slowly because it damages their relationship with their customers.
- Buy the best website hosting that your budget allows. Of course, that alone will not correct the issue, but you must start with good hosting.
- Use cache to help improve load times.
- Optimize your images. We have the best results using Imagify.
- Consider using a CDN. CDN is the acronym for “Content Delivery Network.” Cache versions of your website are kept on servers around the world. Therefore, visitors in California will receive the content from a California-based server, decreasing the load time. However, it does take time for data to travel. In comparison, if a California visitor visits your website but is hosted in Florida, the delay in transmitting the content will result in a slower load time.
What is the best platform to build a high-ranking website on?
There are multiple platforms, but WordPress is the most common and provides developers with the most flexible design options. However, it can be overwhelming to beginners. In addition, we usually recommend avoiding website builders that many hosting companies offer because search engines have difficulty indexing their proprietary code.
What are the best SEO strategies?
This is another challenging question. There are a lot of SEO Strategies and opinions. Most of our answers are provided by Google or on our significant experience.
- Great content!
- Great hosting!
- High-quality links to drive traffic to your website.
- Continue to increase your content.
- But content, hosting, and link building are the most important to produce positive results.
What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
This is a common question, but it is easy to answer.
On-page SEO is related to the website, including the content, title, meta description, etc. In contrast, off-page SEO refers to link building using directory listings, guest posts, and press release distribution for high-quality backlinks.
Which is more critical, on-page or off-page SEO?
Both are critical for a high-ranking website. Both should always be a work in progress you shut for perfection.
Is SEO efforts dying, considering the web has grown to its size?
We don’t think so. There are a lot of poorly designed websites that will never rank well. For example, E-commerce websites will not rank well because of the design structure. We do not think SEO will ever die unless web design systems become more efficient, making it easy to create “search engine friendly” websites.
What is “Core Vitals?”
Core Vitals is a tool to measure website speed, pointing out the technical areas that need to be revised to ensure that a website passes the Google speed test. Core Vitals is a significant factor in rankings as it is part of Google’s effort to enhance user experience. Their studies show that consumers do not wait long for a website to load. Additionally, slow loading website requires more resources for Google to crawl and index a website.
Failing Core Vitals is common. It can be fixed, but very few developers and designers know how to correct the problem areas. It is possible to have a high-speed score but still fail Core Vitals. So don’t be fooled by the score. This is a difficult challenge to correct because most developers only consider the score. Additionally, very few developers know how to correctly resolve the issues. Many will use multiple WordPress plugins to obtain a high-speed score but still fail Core Vitals.
CLICK to visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
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