Why is my website not being found?

How to get your website more visible for free | Practical tips and advice

Congratulations. You have given your business an online presence, which is a great step in the right direction. You have found this blog as your website is not getting being found. It is just getting lost with all the other masses of websites out there. What can do for free to help get your website stand out. Here are some basic tips and advice on things you can do that are free to help get your website more visible.

Why is your website not being found and how do you get it to stand out? 

Get more traffic coming to it without responding to all those hundreds of emails clogging up your mailbox promising you a first-page listing for the cost of your arms and legs.

Some fundamental basics will help your website achieve this. 

This you can do yourself for free, with no catches or subscriptions. 

You will be able to take away some of the points here to get your startup business website working for you properly. 

The best option by far is a good SEO specialist to talk through your business needs and set up your keywords and suggestions to get ranked for your services. The whole reason to be online is usually to be found, SEO is as big an investment as getting the site created.

Approach an SEO specialist yourself, happy to help with a recommendation of who I use, or go to someone with great reviews. Think about it – If they are good at what they do they not be spamming your mailbox. I am not an SEO expert but I always set up basic SEO on all of my websites.

The best practice is to do the two things together do not fall victim to ‘hope you’re having a good day, found your site online I can help get you blah blah ’ emails once you have set up your website. 

Given that you are here because you are trying to get traffic to your website we are retrospectively now including the SEO, which will still work but not as well as if you set out and design the website with this in place.

Get your website visible and see results

Let’s start.

So it sounds simple but what is the name of your website? 

Does it say what purpose your website serves?

What service you provide

In your website, there is a very important tag in HTML called a heading tag. This defines the most important heading on a webpage. It doesn’t matter if your website was created using a drag-and-drop service or a bespoke website it will be the same principle as all websites use it.

It serves as the main title or primary topic of the page, helping both potential visitors and search engines understand the relevancy of the page to what the visitor has put in the search field that found your website.

An Example

So to break this down. 

You have a business, you have a website that looks great. You have named the business ‘Something’. 

This is what you have put as the main header 

The search engine will only find ‘Something’ when that is what someone types in ‘Something’ and it matches what text you have in your header for it to be displayed. You are not as yet as well known as eBay or Amazon or Apple so until your brand name is known put your service here.

Why not make it easier to be found by saying instead of ‘Something’ you said ‘Something Plumbers’ that at least says what your business is about. 

It would be better to remove ‘Something’ from the as it does not convey any real information that helps your website to be found.

If you want your company name there do it using a 

tag but NEVER the on its own unless it has value saying what your site is about.

You can improve it more by doing:-

Plumbers in Sussex 

– narrow down the search by providing an area

Plumbers in Hove 

-further narrow down the search by providing a local area

Or this

– Free callout Plumbers in Hove Sussex

The keywords here are plumbers Hove and Sussex.

This is what SEO research is about to help get you traffic by matching what a person is typing in to find a service that you provide and your site matching that and then coming up as a result for them to then contact you.

The most important factor here is to put yourself in the place of the customer you want to get. 

What would they type into the search field to find the service they are looking for? 

Your website should not be about the Style you want but what would the potential customer or client want to find when they arrive on your website. Make it easy to find and navigate.

Keywords for your website

These keywords the services for which you want to be found need to be included in the content of your site. There are free tools to help with your SEO, yoast is a good choice of a free plugin to get you on the right track without spending any money. Just set up the basic version on your website. It will help guide you through the process for free with your keyword research. 

Once you have found and incorporated your keywords for your website leave them alone in there for at least a few months and up to a year before changing. Google sends out spiders to crawl the web looking for new websites to understand periodically and then rank . It can take a while especially if your website is small for you to be found and the work you have put in to be seen. There is no quick option for this, you cannot force them to come. 

Consider getting Google Analytics included on your site. You can also get this for free and then you will have insight into what people do when they visit your website.