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Have you recently launched a new website only to find your business has disappeared from search results? Here are a few of the most commons reasons why your new website may not be ranking well in search.

Representing your business on the web with an attractive, modern web design and useful content is a great first step in your online marketing plan. But a new website will not work as an effective marketing tool for drumming up new business if nobody can find it. This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important.

By optimizing your content for keywords that relate to the services or products your business provides, and the geographic areas it serves, you can help prospective customers find your business through search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

Unfortunately, some businesses, despite their best efforts, have difficulty improving their search engine visibility in the first several months after launching their website. Why? It depends on the website, but the main reason could simply be that the site is new.

When I say "new," I'm actually talking about two different kinds of new websites: a website with a new design and a website on a new domain. Each type requires a different approach and timeline to remedy the problem.

General Diagnosis for a Website with a New Design

If you've recently launched a new website for your business on the same domain as your old site, your business may not be ranking well because your content has changed.

As long as your content is relevant and useful for prospective customers, you should be able to recover your previous search visibility and even improve it by focusing on optimizing individual pages on your website for search. Check out our previous blog post, "The 5 Most Important On-page SEO Factors," to learn more.

General Diagnosis for a Website on a New Domain

If you've recently launched a website on a brand new domain, and it's not ranking well in search, you may have a long battle ahead of you. Google generally does not rank websites on newly created domains very well because, as far as their crawl bots are concerned, your website is not old enough or popular enough to hang out with the cool kids yet.

All other factors equal, Google will usually favor websites with older domains and with lots of links from other websites, especially sites that are related to your industry. Obviously, there's nothing you can do to affect the age of your domain, but you can start improving the popularity of your website right now by doing three things:

1. If you had an old website for your business on a different domain, make sure you setup a 301 redirect pointing from your old domain to your new domain. This is the best way to ensure that potential customers and search engines are directed to the new domain.
2. Start building links to your new domain. Links are like popularity votes for your website. There are too many link building techniques to cover in this post. For now, focus on getting links from local organizations you sponsor, business membership organizations, your city's chamber of commerce, etc.
3. Optimize the page titles, meta descriptions, headlines, and content on each page for your target keywords. Even if you're just having difficulty showing up for your business name on Google right now, you'll want to optimize for search early on to speed up the entire process.

By following these general steps, your website should start seeing an improvement in its search engine placement in time. If you want help increasing your new website's search engine visibility even faster, contact our Search Engine Marketing team by filling out our Start a Project form below.