HELP! My Website Isn’t Showing Up On Google
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We've all heard it over and over... organic traffic is the best way to grow your website.
So, that's exactly what I did. I started blogging on a regular basis in the hopes that someone would Google the topic of my blog post and voila... there I would magically appear in the search results.
So imagine my (rather defeating) surprise when I logged into Google Search Console and discovered that 113 of my pages were not being indexed. 😲
Cue the panic alarm. 🚨
I did a quick Google search to see just how many of my pages were popping up.... there were five, y’all...FIVE! What?!
I asked Google to crawl my site again, and 3 months later I got this email saying my indexing issues were successfully fixed.
The only problem was, they weren’t fixed! The pages still didn't show up in Google...even a month after I received that email, nothing had changed.
My heart sunk. I had invested all of this time writing blog posts to drive traffic to my site and they had all fallen into a black hole. I HAD to fix this problem.
Thankfully I stumbled across this video explaining the free tool SEOSpace, and that's when things started to turn around pretty quickly. (And no - I’m not getting paid to say this)
SEOSpace (by Henry Purchase) is the one tool that will fix your site if you're not ranking on Google (or even if you want to rank higher). Create your (free) account here.
One of the things I appreciate most about SEOSpace are the helpful videos by Henry. They're short and to the point, and he walks you through the entire process.
Once you have your account created and the plugin downloaded, you can run your first scan. On the free version you're limited to 10 basic scans a month. The basic scan will show -
IMAGES: Are your images missing alt tags? Are they too large?
INDEXING: Is the page being indexed by Google?
LINKS: Do you have any broken links? Do external links open up a new tab?
META DESCRIPTION: Is your description too long?
H1 TAG: Do you have only one H1 tag? Is it the right length?
SECURITY: Does your site include SSL?
URL: Is your url optimized and does it include the correct keywords?
If you only inspect these elements above, you will be ahead of the game. The free version gives you TONS of information that will help you start to rank on Google.
But I chose to upgrade to the paid version for one month (it's only $9.99) while I worked out all of the kinks. Why?
The paid version lets you scan for keywords. This is particularly helpful if you’re trying to get your blog posts to rank. Having the right keywords are essential to ranking higher in Google.
The paid version comes with 10 premium scans (the scans that include the keywords) and unlimited basic scans (the scans that include the 7 things mentioned above). You can purchase additional premium scans if you need them. But a $10 investment for one month to fix my issues was well worth the price.
SEOSpace also has a group where you can post questions and get answers from Henry himself as well as others in the group. It’s also a great place to search prior posts to see how other people solved similar problems you might be having.
Another cool feature about SEOSpace is that it has a dashboard of all of the pages you've scanned. Each time you make improvements and scan your page, the dashboard will show you how much your page's score increased.
WHEN IT STARTED WORKING
The first page I tackled was this blog post. The issues that the scan found were that some of the images were too large, a couple images were missing alt tags, and I needed to add more keywords and adjust my meta description.
It also noticed that it wasn't being indexed (how well I know, ha), so once I fixed all of the issues I resubmitted my site to be indexed by Google. This was on a Friday afternoon. On Monday I checked to see if my site had been crawled....and sure enough, it was crawled on Friday afternoon - the day I made the changes!!
You can see in the image below the sharp increase in impressions and clicks just by fixing a few pages and getting them indexed. The arrow is pointing to the day I started making changes.
IMAGES + CHARACTER COUNT
Almost every page I scanned told me that some of my images were too big and that I needed to alter the length of the meta descriptions. Here are the tools I used to fix both of those issues:
TO RESIZE IMAGES:
FOR META DESCRIPTIONS:
HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE
If you just launched your website, you need to submit your sitemap to Google so that Google's crawlers know to go search for it. Thankfully Squarespace makes this incredibly easy since they've already created your sitemap for you. All you need to do is tell Google where it is.
Go to the Sitemaps section of the console and type in /sitemap.xml then hit Submit.
It can take some time for Google's crawlers to do their thing, so just be patient and check back periodically.
HOW TO INSPECT A URL
If you've already submitted your sitemap and you want to see if a page is being indexed, just type in your url at the top of the search console. If it's not being indexed, then click the “Request Indexing” link.
There's a limit to the number of pages you can request to be indexed each day - I think it's around 20 pages. If you reach the limit, just come back the next day and request the additional pages.
PAGES YOU DON'T WANT INDEXED
Don't be alarmed if you see a really big number of pages that aren't being indexed. In my case, some of those pages I actually DON'T want to be indexed. Every time you write a blog post and assign it a tag or category, Squarespace creates a url for that tag.
Those url's aren't being indexed - and that's ok.
The other pages I don't want indexed are pages that are for members only and require a password to gain access. There's no reason for them to show up on Google because they won't have the password to access the page.
HOW TO SEE WHICH OF YOUR PAGES ARE ON GOOGLE
This is a little trick to see which of your pages are actually showing up on Google. Go to Google and in the search bar type in site:yoursite.com (do not put a space between site: and your site).
Now my measly five pages that were showing up in the results has increased to 42 pages. And I've only been working on this for four days! I can’t wait to see how things improve going forward.
I can't recommend SEOSpace enough. This mighty little plugin has completely turned things around for the effectiveness of my site in a very short time frame. I suggest trying the paid plan for a month so you can audit your site and rank higher on Google.
Higher rank in Google = more organic traffic = more business
*This post may contain affiliate links, so I may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on this site at no additional cost to you.
