Blog » 6 Reasons Why My Site Won't Appear Under "Red Lorry"
Choosing the right keywords is vital to the success of your search engine optimisation campaign and ultimately the success of your web site itself. One of the most common questions we get asked is one related to why a web site doesn’t get listed under certain search terms. In order to help shed some light on this issue here are some reasons why this might be the case. In this example I am assuming the identity of a someone who sells lorries online (amazing what you can do with mail order these days!).
Why my site won’t appear under “red lorry”
The first issue is slightly different to the rest so we will look at this separately:
1. I didn’t specify “red lorry” as a keyword when I signed up for the service.
This situation sometimes occurs where a customer calls us with their monthly search engine report asking why they don’t have any search engine rankings with a particular keyword. After further investigation it transpires that the keyword in question wasn’t specified when the customer signed up. This will mean 2 things; firstly no optimisation work will have been performed around this keyword and secondly the keyword won’t have been added to the reports, so the software won’t have been looking for the site under this term anyway, no matter how many times you appear with it. It is possible to amend your keywords during your optimisation service, so don’t hesitate to speak to your sales contact if this is something you want to do.
OK, so assuming I specified “red lorry” as a keyword, why does my site still not appear with this keyword?
2. I don’t sell red lorries.
This is the most obvious reason but worth a mention nonetheless. Unless red lorries are a part of my business a search engine is not going to consider me among the top 10 resources on the web under this keyword.
3. I sell red lorries but I don’t bother to mention it on my site.
A search engine only has the information my web site provides on which to make it’s judgement. I might be the world’s most renowned red lorry stockist, but if I fail to mention it on my web site then a search engine won’t know anything about it.
4. I sell red lorries, I mention it, but I don’t explain anything about my red lorry service.
It is not enough to simply mention in passing that I sell red lorries if I want to rank well with keywords related to it. A quick search on Google tells me that there are 285,000 results returned for “red lorry”. Why would I appear in the top 10 if I only mention in passing that I deal with it?
5. I sell red lorries, I mention it on my home page, I have a page dedicated to my red lorries with lots of relevant content, but my site isn’t optimised.
Having good keyword-related content is the first part of the battle, but putting some content online and waiting for the search engines to rank me is not going to work. Search engine optimisation requires experience and research in order to make sure my site follows current ranking strategy.
6. I sell red lorries, I mention it throughout my site, my site is optimised, but the keyword is just too vague.
OK, it looks like I have to concede defeat and realise that “red lorry” is just not specific enough to get me those top rankings. All is not lost however because a simple re-assessment of my keywords will help. Perhaps I need to specify what exactly I do with red lorries. Do I sell them, do I service them, do I only deal with a specific brand, or in a specific location? All of these factors can be used to manipulate my rankings. In this example I sell red lorries so I should cater my keywords to match this; “red lorry retailer”, “buy red lorry”, “red lorry stockists”. My red lorries are all secondhand, articulated lorries so I could specify that too; “articulated red lorry”, “buy secondhand red lorry” etc.
If you have any questions about how to improve your search engine rankings please contact us on 01524 423 135 to discuss your requirements.