Reasons why a website can’t be found when people search

I analyse a large number of accommodation websites due to the fact that:

• I live and work in a popular tourist area on the Sunshine Coast. Property managers regularly tell me about their website problems

• I monitor the web stats for the local chamber of commerce using Google Analytics. This gives me an insight into cases where people end up on the general tourism site when really I would have expected them to go straight to a hotel’s own website. For example when someone has searched for a hotel by name. When I investigate it’s invariably because the hotel’s own website is difficult or impossible to find.

Here are some common reasons that account for the low visibility of a website in the search engine pages:

1. The website can’t be indexed so the search engines are unaware of it. I’ve come across several instances lately where a metatag has been added to the website excluding visits from the search engines. I did some work for a holiday resort recently that has had a robots noindex tag for the last 3 years ever since the website was developed. That’s 3 years where they’ve had absolutely no presence at all when someone searches for them or their product.
2. There are other technical problems preventing indexing such as flash entry screens or javascript menus. The search engines are getting better at indexing pages such as these but there are still many cases where it causes a problem.
3. Websites have had dodgy seo work done on them in the past. The most common one I see is multiple domains all containing duplicate copies of the website.
4. The website content is pulled from other sources that already rank well for the major keywords. This is very common in the tourist industry as the easiest option is to grab a piece of promotional blurb that already exists elsewhere. However Google will only show one occurrence of content so don’t expect your website to show for those keywords if you don’t have original content.
5. The essential basics for search engine optimisation haven’t been covered. Relevant, well thought out page titles make the biggest difference to ranking well.
6. The website isn’t old enough to rank for any competitive phrases. It takes about 9-12 months for this to happen so patience is required combined with other marketing initiatives such as Google adWords.

If you have a website and can’t understand why it is hard to find through Google or other search engines contact me and I’ll take a look. Any other comments on common problems will be very welcome here as well.