Why is my website not ranking?

How Google Ranking Websites Works

First off, it’s important to note that Google ranks pages, not websites. It assesses each of your web pages uniquely, so you may not necessarily have a site-wide issue, but a page-by-page issue.

Google’s process for ranking websites looks like this:

1. You publish or update a web page.
2. If that page is accessible, Google’s software, known as crawlers, will enter the page and assess it, following any links on the page to find other pages.
3. If Google’s crawlers like what they see, they will ‘index’ that page with markers based on what they interpret as the page’s meaning, relevance, quality, usability and context.
4. When someone searches for something that aligns with those key factors, Google will display that web page on the search engine results page in order of what they believe best suits the user’s needs.

Search engine optimisation works by assessing websites for the hundreds of factors believed to be used by Google to index and rank websites, improving them to be as strong as possible. This increases a web page’s chance of being ranked for the ideal search terms in a good position, with the ultimate goal being the number one position.

How to Identify if You Have a Website Ranking Issue

If you’re reading this article, there’s a chance you already know your website or a specific page isn’t ranking and you’re looking for a solution — so, you can skip this section. For anyone else, keep reading.

Search engine optimisation tools, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 will help you identify if you have a website ranking issue. They can show you how many people are finding your site, your average rankings, what search terms you’re being found for and even some more specific issues with your site. However, it won’t give you an itemised list of what you need to improve. That takes some working knowledge of websites, search engine optimisation and the hundreds of factors Google considered when ranking your site.

11 Factors That Impact Your Website Ranking

1. Indexation.

For your website to rank on Google, it needs to be indexed. Remember, indexation is when Google has added your web pages to its database with the intent of showing them to people if they search for something relevant to that page. Unless you have requested Google not to index your website, it’s a problem you need to figure out and fix as soon as possible.

You can find a list of indexed pages on your website in Google Search Console. Once you have a list of pages, it’s time to analyse why Google is not considering these pages and the hundreds of factors that may be impacting their success.

2. Site speed.

The faster your website loads on both desktop and mobile, the higher the chance of ranking. While there are many other factors that can impact your website ranking, a slower-loading website provides a bad user experience, which will turn away both users and Google.

What slows down a website? Like SEO itself, there may be many factors bringing your website speed down. It could be your hosting, image size, website size, code volume, plug-ins, features or another issue. All of these factors individually add to your site speed, so working through them one by one can help you reduce your site speed to help increase your rankings.

3. Site security.

Over the past few years, Google has been cracking down on websites that aren’t secure. What they’re looking for is the ‘s’ on the ‘http’ at the start of your URL. If you only have ‘HTTP’ and not ‘HTTPS’, Google is less likely to show your website in its search results, putting you further down the rankings, or not at all.

What is HTTPS? HTTPS stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure, which is the primary protocol that allows a website browser to call and see your website. If it is not secure (the s on HTTP), it leaves your website more vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can put your users’ data at risk, especially if you run an online store. So, Google likes to ensure they’re only servicing secure websites on search results to protect their own users.

4. Content quality.

Content is king in the world of organic search marketing. It’s what Google looks at to know what your page is about to help them decide what search results, if any, that page should be shown on. To be able to do that, they want to ensure your content provides the best possible answer to that search query and comes from a reliable source.

What makes content high-quality is a little difficult. While it needs to be thorough, it must be unique, structured well, use the right keywords (but not too often) and be beneficial to the user. This means knowing how to structure your content, ensure you have enough but not too much, know how to naturally integrate keywords, keep spelling and grammar mistakes to a minimum and use other SEO content best practices. An SEO specialist can help you optimise your content for users, which will, in turn, help with your Google rankings too.

5. Targeting and intent.

Sometimes your website can rank well, even claiming that first place position, and yet you still don’t get traffic, sales or enquiries. If this is happening, or you can’t rank for the terms you want, it could be because the search intent and targeting for your pages isn’t where it should be.

Your content should be geared towards providing the information relevant to people in the ideal sales cycle, whether they’re gathering information, researching pricing or ready to buy. As well as intent, you should be doing thorough keyword research to specifically target each page towards search results where people are most searching that are relevant to what you offer. There is an art to getting the most from these keywords in the content, such as how often you use them, not using them too much and where in the content they are placed. An SEO content specialist can help you ensure you are optimising your content for the right intent and targeting.

6. Freshness and frequency.

Fresh content refers to the relevance of content and being the latest information, while your content frequency is how often you’re posting new content or existing updating content. The more often you’re posting content, the more Google is sending their crawlers into your website to check your content and pages, so you have more chances to rank.

However, how fresh your content is equally as important. If your content has a unique perspective and is deemed as the most up-to-date information, even the oldest content can rank well. It’s all about getting a balance of fresh content and posting regularly to give Google the right amount of quality and quantity.

7. Website authority.

Website authority is made up of several web page ranking factors, referring to the strength of a domain (the custom part of your website address or your website’s unique IP). In theory, the higher your website or domain authority, the higher your chances of ranking. It’s important to keep in mind even with poor website authority you can still rank highly and having high authority doesn’t mean you’ll always rank well as there are hundreds of other factors to consider.

A lot of things can help influence your domain authority, including how old your domain has been active, the quality of the links (see internal, external and broken links below) connecting to your site, the number of visitors you receive each month and keeping spam signals to a minimum. Some SEO tools rate your domain authority from 0 to 100, with the goal to be as close to 100 as possible, which can help you measure the success of your authority building efforts.

8. User experience.

The number one thing Google wants to see on any web page is a good user experience. Even the things already listed here contribute to providing a good user experience, like having a fast website, providing good content, having an adequate linking structure and more. Your aim should always be to provide the best user experience in whatever you’re doing to build or modify your website.

It’s also important to check the user experience your website provides on all devices, especially mobiles. More people are using mobiles to search for information, services and products online than desktop computers, but websites aren’t automatically adjusted to suit all devices. So, it’s best to thoroughly test your website on as many devices as possible to ensure you’re meeting all the requirements for all users.

9. Internal, external and broken links.

Links are the hyperlinked text on a web page that takes you to another web page. Internal links are the hyperlinks that direct you to another page on the same website, while external links take you to a page on another website. Having internal links helps direct users and Google throughout your website, so are ideal to optimise correctly. While having external links pointing to your website from other sites (known as backlinks) helps Google see you are a trusted source of information, including your domain authority (see above).

You should also be keeping broken links to an absolute minimum. Broken links are pages that are no longer active (such as drafting or deleting a page, or changing the URL). Too many broken links can lead Google to believe your site is no longer active or being maintained, or is a spam site, which can be why your website is not ranking.

10. YMYL.

In SEO, YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. This refers to websites for businesses, services, products or information that can have a major impact on someone, such as their financial state, health, the law and more. It covers industries like medical, law, finance, government bodies and many other professional services.

But how does YMYL impact your page rankings? Google assesses YMYL sites a little harder than others. They want to ensure the information being provided can be trusted, such as being from a qualified source, you have the reputation for providing this advice and more. SEO specialists refer to this as EEAT, or experience, expertise, authority and trust, with the goal to improve each to help increase rankings for YMYL sites, as well as any other website.

11. Algorithm updates.

Google makes thousands of changes to their algorithm and systems each year. These changes aim to help provide a better user experience to people using Google, ensuring safer, more reliable sources of information are ranked highly. Of these updates, some are more minor and some are major.

If you notice a sudden drop in your website rankings, it could be because your site has been affected by a Google algorithm update. However, you shouldn’t immediately start changing things. Sometimes a website is only temporarily impacted while Google works out where your web pages below, and changes could actually lead to long-term damage to your organic traffic. In some cases, it is more permanent. This is where it’s important to have an SEO specialist or agency on board who you can trust and rely on to make the right changes and future-proof your site to minimise these dips.