I am having a strange issue with a site of mine where Google has crawled and picked up the site, but it only comes up in results if I search for site:[my domain] in Google search. If I search for the main keyphrase in the title (which also happens to be the name of the domain) it doesn’t come up in results at all- even though the title and META tags all check out ok (I checked them on Hypergurl and ScrubTheWeb etc. and other SEO checkers)
I looked through Google’s webmaster central help but there doesn’t seem to be anything on this exact topic- and I can’t see why, given the good META tags, good title and relevant copy in the pages, it isn’t coming up at all unless I search specifically for the domain.
Anyone got any ideas as to where I should start looking to see where the problem lies?
Well, I do not understand your question specifically, are you trying to rank locally in both organic SERPs & google business listing? You mentioned local sometime lower on this page so I am unsure. But this is what I can tell you from what I understand.
If you are not seeing your website in the index of Google when you search your keywords normally, then I recommend that you get high page rank backlinks…
Also if you are trying to rank in the business local listings, then you will need more local links. I will sell a report when I get enough posts on here so you that I am here to help out as much as possible.
below is a list of local listings that will help you the local listings. I recommend that you build these up over 3 day period and make sure you ping the site once approved:
yelp
merchant circle local.com
local media
These are few to help out you and whoever else.
Here is another recommendation that really helps out a lot:
Do a press release, submit that press release to many press release sites and have your url in the press. 99% of all free and paid release sites allow this.
Thanks… I’ll see what sites I can find that will allow this.
Have to be a bit careful because many forums for this industry (or indeed any industry) tend to frown upon blatant advertising / posting of links to sites, so I’ll need to choose carefully.
I know the site isn’t being ranked for the kewyords / search phrase- that’s precisely the problem.
I have been submitting the site to relevant local business directories (e.g those which are in the correct geographical area, and relevant to the industry) already. I could add more, but without Google “seeing” the site properly that will only be of extremely limited help…
Interestingly I have now also searched in Google for the search phrase with quotes (i.e “[first word][second word][third word]”) and it doesn’t come up AT ALL in these results! (there are only 6 pages of them so I’m certain of it)
I suspect that your pages will come up if you do a suitably targeted search, and/or patiently scroll far enough down the SERPs.
It’s very unlikely that Google will have indexed your site so that it appears on a site: query but doesn’t appear at all on a normal keyword search. What is almost certainly happening is that your site is there on the SERPs, but Google doesn’t (yet) think it is important enough to rank near the top. As seotogo says, a new site in a competitive field will struggle to get into the first few pages. It takes patience, commitment and quality to get near anywhere near the top for popular and common queries.
Remember, Google is in the business of giving people the sites most relevant to their search query - they are not there to make life easy for webmasters. And if there are dozens of other sites offering similar information, services or products to yours, what are you doing to make your site better than all of them? Why should Google put your site above your competitors’?
It may depend upon how new your website is and how competitive your main keyword phrase is. As an example, perhaps you have a website called home-mortgage-loan.com but because this is a new website and an extremely competitive field, you will not rank for “home mortgage loan” anytime soon.
Thanks for the replies. The things that concerns me is that I got this domain name especially because it comprises the three most important keywords in order i.e [first word][second word][third word].domain suffix, and yet if I search for that precise phrase (either omitting quotes or including) the site does not come up at all- even though that phrase is not only the exact same phrase that makes up the domain name but also is repeated meaningfully (without overdoing it) within the page titles, meta keywords (for what they’re worth), h1 / h2 etc. and the remaining content- in other words it reads and cascades logically as far as I can tell.
On top of that the first keyword is geographically quite specific so it’s not as if the phrase is generic- it relates to a particular service in a specific geographical area. I would have thought it should be somewhere in the first five pages of results or so?
It is completely disheartening when you’ve done everything right as far as you can tell but Google just ignores the site! I am not suggesting that it should necessarily go above competitors’ sites but it should surely be above the pages and pages of irrelevant results that come up for that search phrase…
Yahoo and Bing have placed it at #1 of all results for that same phrase so I cannot see how / why Google have chosen to not list it at all.
I went through the first 30 pages of results just now and it wasn’t in there on Google- and really if it’s not in the first 3 or so it may as well not be there at all anyway!
How long has the site been live? Google are known to be slower at pushing new sites (sites, not pages) up the rankings than Yahoo or Bing, because their algorithm gives more weight to inbound links - obviously, it takes a bit longer to get those links.
The best thing you can do now is to promote your site in relevant forums and try to get links from relevant websites.