Why website isn't showing on results?

[kymodo]

Hello Moz!

Just got a quick question - we have a clientcalled and for some reason they just aren't showing up in the search results. It's not a new domain and hasn't been penalised (or has reason for penalty).

All the content is fresh and has no bad back links to the site. It is a new website and has been indexed by Google but for even for branded search terms, it just doesn't show up anywhere on page 1 (i think page 4).

Any help or advise is great appreciated is it's doing my head in.

We are using www.google.com.au.

Kindest Regards

[David-Kley]

Lots of questions come to mind.

1. How old is the site? (how long has it been live?)
2. How optimized is the content? New doesn't mean good.
3. You mentioned there aren't any bad backlinks, are there any good ones?
4. Does a sitemap exist? Has it been submitted in Webmaster tools?

A few things I noticed:

I ran the site through SEO-browser.com, and saw you have headings above your first H1. This tool allows you to see your site the same way a search engine does. There isn't a lot of content on the home page either, only 1 paragraph above the fold, and most of it is bullet points.

The blog page only has 2 posts. One has a broken image path. The blog on this site does not seem to be used effectively.

On the pages I looked at, there are not a lot of internal links encouraging people to explore the site. I have noticed that Google tends to not like "dead end" pages. Consider adding links both internal and external from your pages, and expanding the content.

Even though you have the Google+ link, authorship is not set up for the website. I would add more validation links to existing citation profiles, or if they dont exist, create some. In the "Extracted structured data" there is required structure missing for that snippet to work properly.

Site appears to be focusing strongly on finance, might want to expand to the active term, "financing", and check google trends and keyword tool to see if that is more popular.

Footer location info is not marked up in rich snippet format. You can view how to do this here:
http://www.schema.org/Organization

Site index shows a default wordpress page being indexed:

All pages have a page title with the company name, rather than focusing on the subject matter page is about.

No keywords in backend seo.

That should give you a good start. Hope this helps!

[David-Kley]

Wanted to include the links to the tools I used to find this info. I would bookmark them for future reference.

http://seo-browser.com/
Click "simple" button if you want to analyze without signing up. However, if you do sign up (its free) you get additional information that may help you.

Google rich snippets preview tool:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Simply copy and paste your url. You can also analyze URLs by specific pages, to target individual page errors.

Schema:
http://www.schema.org/docs/schemas.html
Take a look and see what category is a best fit for your business markup.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Chris,

Correct me if this information is outdated, but Open Site Explorer sees no inbound links pointing to the site. Ahrefs (a similar tool) sees <a>two</a>. Along with David's points about on-site optimisation, this is a big problem - even with all the changes Google has made in the past couple of years regarding site quality, links are still a very important part of the ranking algorithm. It's very hard to rank well without quality inbound links from third party websites.

I would look seriously into link development - the link building section of this blog is a great resource for ideas and current practices.