Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about the silent frustration of launching a brand new website, only to find Google acts like it doesn't even exist. It's such a painful moment. You spend weeks, maybe months, building this beautiful digital storefront for your business. Yeah, your fantastic baker up in Paso Robles or a reliable contractor right here in a Royal Grande. Exactly. And you type your business name into the search bar. You're all ready to see that hard work pay off nothing. Nothing. You get results for a competitor or maybe just Yelp. Yeah. It's maddening. That invisibility is just, it's tough. You know the site is live, but the internet's biggest librarian, Google, hasn't filed your card yet. So we're going to give you the precise diagnostic checklist. We'll detail the five most common reasons why this happened. And how any small business owner can fix it, even without being a, you know, a technical wizard. Okay, let's unpack this because the very first step is a diagnosis. You have to figure out if your problem is indexing or ranking. Right. And they require completely different solutions. Totally different. Most people confuse the two. So we need to note, does Google even know I exist or does Google just not think I'm good enough to be near the top? That's exactly it. Yeah. Indexing means Google has catalogued your pages. They've noted your address and your content. Okay. Rankings where you show up in the results after they've indexed you. And if you don't solve the indexing problem first, well, ranking is impossible. So how does the average business owner check this? I mean, without running complex tools, there's one dead simple test you should run right now. Okay. Open Google. And in the search bar, you just type site.colon and then your website.com. Site.yourwebsite.com. No spaces, you said. No spaces at all. And of course, replace your website.com with your actual domain name. So what are we looking for? Well, if you see a list of your website pages, your homepage, your services page, your blog, that means you are indexed. Congratulations. Your problem is a ranking issue
[2:01]
and we'll get to fixes for that in a minute. You are found just not high enough yet. But if I run that command and I see absolutely zero results, then we know our fundamental issue. Google doesn't know you exist. You haven't been catalogued. Right. Bingo. And that brings us to reason number one, which is often the easiest to diagnose, but the hardest to accept. What's that? You are simply too new. It feels like the internet should be instant, right? I hit publish yesterday. Why aren't the crawlers here today? I know. Google uses this automated software, they call them crawlers, that are constantly scanning the web. Think of them like delivery trucks running routes. OK. For an established website, adding a new page or two is pretty quick, maybe one to three days to get indexed. But if you launch a brand new domain name, one with zero history, those delivery trucks can take weeks, sometimes even months, to fully discover and trust your content. Weeks or months. Wow. That's tough news for say a new coffee shop owner in downtown SLO who needs that foot traffic right now. It is. Is there any way to skip the line? You can absolutely speed up the process. I mean, patience is part of it. But the proactive fix is submission. You need to create a site map. Which is literally a map of all your website pages. It is. And you submit it directly to Google Search Console. OK. So that's the tool. Google Search Console. You log in there and you tell Google, hey, here's the map. Come look at my house now. Precisely. It forces Google to look much faster. Now while we're on the topic of time, let's inject a little dose of reality about ranking. OK. Give us that sobering stat. Studies show that the websites that currently hold a spot in the top 10 search results are on average over two years old. Two years. And only about 20% of first page results are less than a year old. It's an endurance game, not a sprint. So we need time. But we also need customers and Grover Beach this week. This means we have to address every single speed bump, starting with what you call reason number two, the technical block.
[4:03]
The technical block? You might have accidentally locked the door on those Google Deliver truck. This is really the low-hanging fruit. These are technical issues that prevent Google from accessing your site at all. And I see these three blocks almost weekly. OK. Let's run through these digital word blocks. Keep it jargon free for our local business owners. Roadblock number one. Yeah. An accidental file that literally tells search engines to go away. It's often called the robots.txt file. Robots.txt. OK. Now, this file isn't evil. It actually has a purpose, like telling Google to ignore, say, your admin login area. Yeah. But if it's misconfigured, it can accidentally tell Google's crawlers don't even enter the property. So that's the equivalent of putting a giant keep outside on your front lawn, even though you're open for business. Perfect analogy. Exactly. Roadblock 2 is usually a setting on the page itself. It's often called the Noindex tag. Noindex. Yeah. Think of it like this. When people are building a new site, they often check a little box that says, discourage search engines from indexing this site while it's under construction. Oh, I have done that. I forgot to turn that switch off when I launched a test page a few years ago and spent three days wondering why no one could find it. See? It's so common. That little checkbox stays ticked. And Google politely respects your request not to be listed. Oh, wow. OK. And the third one. The third and simplest one is your site is still password protected. Or it's stuck behind a maintenance page. So if a human needs a password to see it, Google can't crawl it either. You got it. So the pro-active fix here is to just go through website settings, look for any button that says discourage search engines or private mode and just make sure it's turned off. And if you can't find it. This is one of those issues where a local web pro can look at your code for five minutes and immediately spot the problem. Don't let a tiny error sabotage you. OK. That's great advice. Let's move to reason number three, the need for speed. We're talking about how quickly your website loads. This feels like it's just a courtesy to the user. But you're saying it's a critical ranking factor for Google.
[6:05]
Oh, it's absolutely critical. Google explicitly includes site speed in its ranking algorithm. It makes perfect business sense, right? Google wants to send its users to the best possible experience. And a slow site is a bad experience. A very bad experience. The numbers on this are shocking. OK, hit me with them. The average website today takes about 3.21 seconds to load fully. 3.21, OK. That is slow by Google standards. But the winners, the sites consistently on Google's first page, they load in about 1.65 seconds. Wow. That's nearly twice as fast. So if my site takes three seconds, I'm already losing the race before anyone even sees my homepage. And that speed directly impacts your bottom line here on the central coast, especially with Apache Cell Service on parts of Iway 1. The probability of a visitor leaving your site immediately, what we call the bounce rate, it increases by a staggering 32% when your load time goes from just one second to three seconds. That is one third of my potential customers in Pismo Beach clicking away because the site lagged for two extra seconds. And it takes five seconds to load. 38% of people bounce immediately. Google sees that high bounce rate, interprets it as user dissatisfaction, and demotes your site. So if I'm not a tech person, what's the actionable fix to get my speed down? Use Google's own free tool. It's called page speed insights. It's great. You just plug in your website address, and it tells you exactly what's failing. And what are the common culprits? Almost always it boils down to two things. First, optimize your images. Those beautiful high-res photos from your restaurant opening in San Simeon might be 10 megabytes each. Way too big. Way too big. They need to be compressed. The second fix involves your hosting and your add-ons. If you're on a really cheap slow hosting, your site will be slow period. Yeah. And if you have dozens of unnecessary plugins running, they're slowing you down. So stop uploading huge photos directly from your phone and audit those plugins. That's a great start. Perfect. OK, that leads us into reason number four, which
[8:06]
is all about reputation and trust signals. Yeah, authority. If you're a new financial advisor in San Maria, you might be brilliant, but Google doesn't know you yet. Exactly. And it relies heavily on what we call backlinks. The analogy I use is that Google treats links from other reputable websites to your site as peer reviews. Votes of confidence. Votes of confidence. If you're brand new, you have zero votes. So there are zero signals that your content is trustworthy. So we need votes. And we need them from sources. Google already trusts. How does a small business owner in Oceano do that without spamming the internet? Well, what's fascinating here for local businesses is that quality absolutely trumps national quantity. You'd need a link from the New York Times. You need local links. You need highly relevant local links. Yeah. Focus on three simple things. First, get listed in every relevant local business directory, especially your city's Chamber of Commerce. Those are high-trust local votes. That makes perfect sense. Second, practically ask local partners or suppliers you work with if they can link to you from their website. If your local graphic designer has a portfolio page, ask them to link to your live site. Great idea. What's number three? Look for specific local opportunities. Do you sponsor a local sports team in Napolno? Ask for a link on our sponsor page. These are relevant local trust signals. It's about being deeply embedded in the local ecosystem, not just some random site floating on the web. That's it, which brings us to our final point. Reason number five, thin content. The half-baked page problem. The half-baked page problem. You might have done everything right technically, your indexed, your fast, you have a few backlinks, but you gave Google nothing of substance to work with. Like a home page with just three bullet points in a phone number. Exactly that. Or your service page is only contain a single sentence. Google won't understand what your business is about or why it should list you. Even worse, if you just copied content from a competitor, Google sees that duplication and will just ignore you.
[10:08]
So we need to be thorough and original. What does substantive mean for, say, a plumber and sandless abyss bow? It means clarity and detail. Don't just say we offer plumbing services. Explain your specific services. Drain cleaning, water heater installation, emergency callouts, answer common questions. And critically, you must clearly state your location. Serving Pismo Beach or Royal Grande and all of South SLO County. Those city names have to be in your content. They have to be. Give Google the context it needs to correctly categorize you as the best local solution. Make every page rich, original, and hyper-focused on who you serve right here in the 805. OK, so let's wrap this all up. We need patience, right? Referencing that two-year stat for top 10 rankings. But we also need local success now. Absolutely. The biggest mistake new businesses make is aiming nationally. A heating repair service in a taskadero doesn't need to compete with some huge Chicago firm. They need to win local searches. Furnace Repair near me or HVAC a taskadero. That's the game. If you focus on being the fastest, most trustworthy, and most substantive result for your specific location and services, those local results will accelerate much faster than trying to climb the national ranks. Be thorough, be patient, keep your site updated and fast. And you will move from being invisible to being found. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At ugrow.pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update forever for just $79 a month. We're local here in AG, and that we can have you live in days, not months. There is zero setup fee, no contract lock-in, and it is strictly month-to-month, so there is zero risk. If you want to see what your site could look like, go to ugrow.pro right now, and we'll design three custom mock-ups for your business, completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening, and keep growing.