Parkway Cinema presents the very best of the current screen releases, from the family blockbusters you expect, to more adventurous films you might not. The cinema also offers a wide range of ‘event cinema’, bringing the best in live operas, ballet and theatre from around the world to the big scr

The White Horse Inn (Nellies) is one of the oldest pubs in Beverley, dating back to 1666. Its nickname comes from Nellie Collinson, the landlady who resided here until 1976 when the pub was sold to Samuel Smiths Brewery. Walking into Nellies is like stepping back in time. There are labyrinths of sto

Inclusion in the Michelin guide has been a mark of fine dining quality since 1926 when Michelin started sending out anonymous reviewers to try different restaurants to include in their guidebooks. Even now, Michelin relies entirely on its reviewers to determine whether or not a restaurant should be

Café Velo is a cycling themed café located in the heart of Beverley, on North Bar Within. The café serves delicious homemade food with good quality local ingredients and great locally blended coffee. There are vegetarian friendly and gluten free options available too.

One of the most interesting shops on Beverley's busy pedestrian street is St Crispins Antique Centre. Housed in a fine Grade II listed building and boasting one of the largest collections of antiques in the north of England, St Crispins has 2 large floors of rooms and cabinets which have a wide rang

The Beverley Early Music Festival marks its 30th anniversary in 2017 which ties in with Hull's city of culture year. The festival takes place around Beverley from Friday 26th May - Monday 29th May and is designed to bring together the history, ecclesiastical architecture and music of the past for th

The world-renowned Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, will open at Beverley Art Gallery in The Treasure House in Beverley on Saturday 11 February, featuring 100 awe-inspiring images, from fascinating animal behaviour to breathtaking wild

Beverley Street Angels area a group of volunteers that patrol the streets of Beverley town centre in hi-vis jackets, on a night time, ready to care for the vulnerable and needy. Launched in 2012 and run by the church in Beverley, they have helped hundreds of people safely on their way.

Lurking in Beverley's dark and distant past are some spooky and grisly tales. Allow the inimitable Dr Smalls, your eccentric guide, to take you on a ghost tour around Beverley's dark underbelly and unravel some devilish tales. Dressed in his frock coat, top hat and with his gladstone bag, he is looking forward to making your acquaintance.

Beverley has been named one of the best places to live in the north of England by The Sunday Times' annual "Best places to live" guide. This is the first time that Beverley has featured in the guide, which is compiled on the basis of statistics relating to jobs, schools, broadband speed and community spirit.

Company leaders view marketing expenditures as non-revenue-generating activities. It doesn't matter how many searches a keyword has in a month if it doesn't accurately reflect the content on your page! Link Exchange is another good way for building links. However, you need to be careful with this one. I am …

The internet offers a valuable form of direct marketing. To understand your website, Google must be able to read it. In order for this to be possible, you must make sure that your website is text based behind the scenes. In this sense content is king. Once you create your …

your product is a mobile app). Many people don't pursue backlinks from Wikipedia because they're all "nofollow" links, which means search engines like Google don't count them as positive trust signals for your website. There are a lot of SEO experts looking for strategies that will give them advantage over …

A helpful way to think of header tags is by comparing them to a table of contents for a non-fiction book. Competitors might enter a market and usurp a brand's position. As such, ranking number one for your business name, while it's an important foundation, is really only of secondary …

Each page deeper you get into the site, the more specific you can and should be. Good sitemaps help humans to find what they are looking for and help search engines to orient themselves and manage their crawl activities. Googlebot, in particular, may complete the indexing of your site over …

An infinite number of niches are waiting for someone to claim them. I'd ask yourself where you want to be, and see if you can find a path from a tiny specific niche to a slightly bigger niche and so on, all the way to your desired goal. Sometimes it's …

Google has given significant backing to its Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative too, and the evidence so far suggests it is paying off. Advertising offers an excellent venue to increase brand awareness. Google uses over 200 ranking factors, and some of the most powerful ranking factors involve backlinks. If you want …

Solid communications objectives should be established. Traditional marketing / advertising is outbound, meaning you have to disrupt people's attention in order to communicate your message (i.e. Besides link building, social media and social bookmarking can help improve a website's search engine standing. A problem that can arise is that some …

We do this through a number of audits and data crosswalks to identify key pages that can be improved to deliver a fast turn around in traffic. Google said the data it collects from its human raters does not directly impact the ranking of any individual website. This information becomes …

It's sometimes hardest to do organic search optimization projects in new category spaces, because the search interest is just not there yet. Pinterest ads trigger keyword searches and pinning behaviors. High-quality content on and off your website and using strategic link-building tactics (internal links and backlinks) is a critical component …

Website migration can be a challenge to SEO but, when done correctly, you can preserve your Google organic rankings with a smooth transition. Correctly implementing a website migration can be a difficult process and many fail to consider the effect it may have on your organic traffic. Even those that do often leave it too late and struggle to recover from the hit to their traffic.

If you are making major changes to your website then you want to ensure that the site migration goes smoothly. You could be changing servers, domain names, hosting company or migrating to a new content management such as Wordpress. Whatever your website migration, you still want to transfer your old site SEO to your new site and ensure that the move does not negatively impact your current website rankings and traffic in Google.

Zero Loss in Search Rankings

If done to best practice, a website migration with an SEO focus should lead to an increase in organic traffic, improved rankings in organic search, and increased revenue.

I have over 20 years experience in making website changeovers and migrations with no loss to search rankings. I’ve helped migrate large companies with million pound turnovers as well as SMEs with small or midsize sites and have worked across multiple industries. Regardless of the size of the company, the goal is the same: zero loss in search rankings.

Switching your website to any platform presents unique challenges when preserving your Google organic rankings however by following the process outlined below, you will achieve zero loss in SEO rankings.

The Planning Stage

If SEO is not taken into account in the planning stages of your site migration then you may find yourself suffering a nasty surprise when the day of the changeover happens. I’ve worked as a systems administrator and developer in the past and understand the technicalities of a website changeover only too well. If the migration is not planned meticulously then it could cost you your existing website traffic, losing you sales and revenue.

The first stage of the website SEO migration process starts at the planning table. We work together to identify and outline what the goals of the migration are and devise a strategy to achieve them. We will then review the site and identify exactly what is changing and updating; this will include outlining the content requirements, mapping URLs and determining redirects.

The final part of the pre-migration stage is to assess the site to determine how it is currently performing so we can use this as a benchmark to check against when the migration is complete.

During and after the website SEO migration

As the migration takes place, I’ll be on hand to help your technical team with any issues that may arise.

Once your site has been switched over, I’ll conduct a number of technical checks to make sure that there are no indexing or crawl errors. I’ll then closely monitor your organic traffic and Google position to ensure that there are no drops in performance. If any issues do occur, I’ll work out a plan to address them immediately.

Get in Touch

If you’re planning a website migration and don’t want to adversely affect your SEO rankings then I can help. If you get in touch with details of your migration, I’ll get back to you with a no-obligation quotation.

A technical SEO audit is always my recommended first step when taking on a new SEO project. It enables both myself and the customer to identify any on-site or off-site issues which are preventing the site rising to the top of Google's search rankings. Armed with this knowledge, a plan will be produced on how to address them.

SEO Audit Purpose

The overriding purpose of an SEO audit is to improve a site's rankings in Google and other search engines. The audit analyses multiple aspects of your website and helps you understand which aspects of your site are working well and which need improving. It covers structural and content components affecting your SEO visibility.

The SEO audit can be general or focused on a particular area of concern. For example, you may be experiencing problems with speed, indexability or low click through rates. The results of the audit will allow you to identify any issues and work to resolve them.

What does the SEO audit include?

For your SEO audit, I'll perform the following:

• Technical analysis
• On-Page analysis
• Off-Page analysis
• Competitive analysis and keyword research

There are over 200 individual items to look at, all of which in some way or another will affect your search ranking if not addressed correctly. The audit is extremely comprehensive and ensures that no stone is left unturned.

Technical Analysis

The first part of the audit consists of checking your site for accessibility and indexability issues.

Accessibility ensures that the site can be accessed by both humans and the Google crawlers. When I'm looking at the accessibility of your site, I'll check such things as your robots.txt file, your sitemap, meta tags and redirects. I'll also test your site for mobile friendliness and response times amongst other things.

Indexability ensures that the site can be indexed with the major search engines. As part of the process, any Google penalties will be identified and a plan of action proposed.

On-Page analysis

For the next part of the SEO audit I look at on-page elements. Here I identify both general content issues and page specific issues. This includes the likes of HTML improvements, URL structure, title tags and H1/H2 tags. Google favours websites that have a good site architecture and are structured and categorised correctly.

If your site has pages with thin content then they will be flagged up too as Google likes content heavy pages. Duplicate content related issues are examined and your site will be checked for broken links to ensure your search ranking is not negatively affected by them.

Furthermore, as part of the on-page analysis in the SEO audit, I also look at your structured data to see if you're taking advantage of rich snippets in the search engine results.

Off-Page Analysis

Simply put, off-page analysis evaluates your incoming links and identifies toxic links.

In this part of the audit, I analyse your link profile and make sure that it’s not adversely affecting your SEO strategy. I check for link relevancy, diversity and authority, and examine the anchor text that is used to link to your site.

I’ll inspect whether the links back to your website are primarily from trustworthy, reputable websites. A number of industry sources are used for this purpose.

If you’ve bought backlinks from unscrupulous dealers then it may well be that they are on sites that you don’t want your brand to be associated with. Alternatively, they may be low quality, spammy links that are doing damage to your site.

Competitor Analysis

The final part of the SEO audit looks at what your top competitors are doing for SEO and how your SEO activities compare to theirs. It helps you to learn about your competition and how to stay ahead of them.

Here I look at your competitor’s domain rating, which shows how strong their domain is, and how solid their backlink profile is. I also determine the number of referring domains (a high number of referring domains can also indicate a strong site—provided that those links aren’t low‐quality).

The final part of the audit, and potentially the most important, identifies the organic traffic and keywords that your competitor’s site is achieving in organic search. Going forward, the more lucrative keywords are identified and targeted by yourself as part of your ongoing SEO strategy.

Final Steps

The completed SEO audit will provide you with real, actionable insights that you can either implement yourself or work with an SEO consultant to do so for you. After you’ve received the audit, we’ll put together a plan to determine the way forward for your SEO strategy based on the recommendations made.

If you'd like me to conduct a technical SEO audit or you'd like to discuss things further, then please get in touch.

A good SEO Consultant will use best practice organic search engine optimisation tactics to take a website from a virtual unknown to a page one ranking on Google. With over 20 years of experience in helping companies grow on Google, I know what it takes to help you achieve top rankings, better traffic, and better conversions.

To put it simply, I design and deliver SEO campaigns that make my customers more successful on the Internet.

SEO is one of those marketing disciplines that requires techical knowledge, foresight, plenty of planning, a methodical approach and marketing intuition. I believe in the power of good search engine optimisation and Ive built an SEO consulting practice around my SEO knowledge and the hard work that I am willing to dedicate to your project.

My SEO Consultancy Service

Whether you need migration support, advice on your content strategy, a review of your taxonomy, or help with something thats gone wrong, my aim is to deliver results as quickly as possible. I dont take a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, I'm flexible and fluid.

My SEO consultancy service includes everything you need to gain a better understanding of where you are currently, where you need to go, and how we can get there. As every website is different, ever SEO plan needs to be different too. The following is a list of what my search engine optimisation consulting services can include, depending on your goals and needs.

Understand Your Objectives

The first and most important aspect for any SEO consultant is to understand your business objectives. What do you want to achieve from the partnership? During these discussions we also agree scope, timescales, resources and pricing.

Technical SEO Audit

My technical SEO audit will dig deep into your website to find search engine optimization opportunities and areas for refinement. My audits cover all aspects of what is best for SEO, including on-page SEO, content, off-site SEO, HTML markup, backlinks, site structure, and more.

Competitor Analysis

One of the best ways to learn about you and your market is to study your market by competitor analysis. Ill deep dive into their websites, keyword usage, content, and their performance to help devise a roadmap for your success.

Content Marketing

If website content isnt your strength I can help you discover the right type of content marketing for your specific target market. This content can then be used on your own site or distributed to high authority sites around the Internet.

Link Building

I am cautious about cheap link builders, as I believe the best links are derived from helping others. I'll help you uncover hidden opportunities for expanding your link building efforts with high-quality sites that drive awareness and traffic.

Local SEO

Trying to dominate a local market with local SEO? I can show Google exactly why they should rank you for local keywords (like SEO consultancy) and help you appear in the Google Maps results for non-local keywords, cutting ahead of the organic competition.

Site Migrations

Website migrations carry both great risk and great opportunity. Whether rebranding, switching platform or expanding in to new markets, my proven approach to website migration will both keep you safe and maximize your potential.

Google Penalty Removal

Using intelligent Google penalty removal strategies, I have helped numerous companies recover from the associated issues. Regardless of the type of problem youre experiencing, I can be of assistance and set your website back on track.

I hope that this has given you a flavour of what I can do.

Work With Me

With my SEO help, you will gain an understanding of where your best search engine optimisation opportunities lie, a road-map for implementation, and a partner in your success.

Whether its your in-house marketing team that requires support and guidance, or youre looking for someone to do your SEO, Ive got you covered. I work in ways that are suitable to you, so you get maximum ROI while being comfortable in your position.

Contact me today to find out what I can do to improve your rankings and organic traffic with intelligent organic search marketing.

86% of customers use search engines to find local businesses. 76% of local searches result in a call. Local searches lead to local sales.

Small businesses face different challenges when marketing their companies than larger brands and businesses. For local businesses, showing up at the top of search results is important, but only if it's in the area your company serves. That's where local SEO comes in. Local SEO is essentially about communicating the local relevance of your web pages to the search engines.

25% of business searches on Google are now location-specific and the majority of searches are now conducted on mobile devices

Local search engine optimisation is also about the process of ranking your Google My Business listing higher on the Search Engine Results page with the intent of increasing phone calls and website visits from certain search queries.

1 in 5 Google search queries are location-specific. Are you outperforming in local search?

What local SEO and SEO have in common is they aim to bring in more qualified leads to your business by bringing more traffic to either your website or your local business listing.

The Benefits of Local SEO

• Local SEO increases your websites rankings in the search results and in the local pack
• Local SEO receives the highest conversion levels of all local advertising channels
• Local SEO helps mobile users easily find your business
• Local SEO ensures your business is found on Google maps and through other navigational apps

How do I rank well in local search?

There are three core elements of local SEO ranking. These factors will determine how well you do in local search:

• Proximity: How close is your business to the searcher?
• Relevance: How relevant to the search query are your products and services?
• Prominence: What do other consumers say about your products and services?

My Approach to Local SEO

As a local SEO consultant, I utilise various tools, techniques and strategies to improve your local presence online. I track what local SEO strategies worked with similar clients, so I know I'm executing what I know to work. I am diligent when making decisions for your SEO campaign to ensure the strategy is customised to meet your exact needs

Below are some of the methods that can be used to promote your business by local SEO:

Website localisation

Here we make sure that your website is local to the area that you want to target. To do this, we ensure that your location is added naturally on the pages in your site. If you have multiple locations, you may need to create targetted pages for each location.

Citation building

Next we need to ensure your site appears in local directories or sites that are relevant to the local area. These sites need to list your location and URL so the search engines understand the link between the two.

Google My Business

Your Google My Business page is an important element of local SEO. Having a Google My Business page ensures that your business profile appears right when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search or Maps.

Managing reviews and ratings

Reviews of your site perform two functions. Firstly, they will help showcase your business and secondly they send signals to Google that you are a trusted business. The amount of reviews you receive, the overall quality of the reviews and the authority of the review sites themselves are all important factors for local SEO.

Adding schema markup to your pages

Schema is some additional code that gives Google additional information about your business/website, and helps them to better understand the data being displayed on your website. This data can be local data which helps to lift your site in the local search rankings.

Build backlinks

Backlinks are the most important ranking factor for local organic results and for the local snack pack, theyre the second most important factor (after proximity, categories and keywords). Link building is an important aspect of local SEO and naturally obtained backlinks from well-regarded websites help search engines recognize your site as a trusted source of information. This includes links from local newspapers, bloggers and business associations.

Its estimated that 1 in 3 search queries typed into a standard Google search bar are about places, and finding out information about locations. This, combined with Google giving more personalised search results, means location is a key factor when Google serves results for users.

I can provide an effective local SEO strategy to maximise your exposure across organic search results. Contact me to find out more.

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks or backlinks from other websites to your own. Links are a hugely important signal that the search engines use to determine rankings: increasing the number of high-quality links pointing at your website can significantly increase your chances of ranking well.

Google's algorithms are complex and always evolving, but backlinks are an important factor in how every search engine determines which sites rank for which keywords. Building links is one of the many tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO) because links are a signal to Google that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation. Therefore, sites with more backlinks tend to earn higher rankings.

According to Google: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

Natural Link Building

Building links can be done either the right way or the wrong way. The right way is to earn contextual links from quality websites - a process known as natural linkbuilding. The wrong way is to buy or swap backlinks from other websites or link directories. If you care about the long-term viability of your site, you should only use an SEO consultant that engages in natural link building.

Natural, organic link building is a difficult, time-consuming process. Not all links are created equal: the weighting that Google gives to any link depends on how Google perceives the linking site. If its a high authority site then it will be a positive signal. Conversely, if its a low authority site, it will be a negative signal.

My Approach to Link Building

As part of my SEO services, I will build contextual links back to the pages on your site from other high authority sites on the Internet. This will increase the authority of your site and, consequently, your rank on Google.

The process works as follows:

• I contact relevant, high authority sites that I have experience of working with
• I write quality articles around your particular products/services
• I place the articles on the website with a natural link back to your website

My link building process is simple and effective using quality sites and content to build trust and authority for your website.

Bespoke Link Building for your Brand

The strategies I implement vary based on the client and every campaign is built bespoke and from scratch based on the proven link building principles I've used for many clients across the world.

With these linking strategies, I am able to deliver services that rival the largest agencies in the world and in most cases, outperform them.

I am dedicated to delivering long-term, sustainable results for all the brands that I promote. I continually focus on developing a natural backlink profile for my clients.

If you would like me to work for you building links or fulfilling all or any other part of your SEO project, then please get in touch.

Have you seen a major drop off in visits to your website? Are you no longer ranking for keywords you used to before? Or have you fallen out of the Google index completely? If so, you may have been hit by a Google penalty.

If you have, don't panic: I can help you recover from this.

As an SEO consultant, I love to study and understand Google's ever changing algorithms, Google's Quality Guidelines and how to adhere to these boundaries when planning and executing SEO campaigns. I have used this knowledge and my 20+ years of SEO experience to help many customers from lots of different industries recover from Google penalties.

If your rankings have started to take a dip or have plummeted then act now. These penalties can make or break a business.

Thats why I pride ourselves on a fast acting, responsive service.

What Causes a Google Penalty?

Google has been given manual penalties for years now to combat black hat link building techniques which are designed to give boosts in the search rankings. They can be caused by hiring a link building company to create links: you know the ones "100 links for a tenner" or "100 high DA dofollow backlinks".

• They could be links from low quality private blog networks, spammy forums, link directories or blog comments. They all probably have the same anchor text too.

• In addition to this, providing a substandard user experience for your audiences can also be reason enough for Google to penalise your website. This could include keyword stuffing, cloaking, computer generated content, hiding text or spam on your site.

When Google finds an issue with your site or your backlink profile, they will take action against you.

This action could be one of the following:

• Manual Penalty: This occurs when someone from within Google has manually reviewed your site and determined that it has breached one or more of their guidelines.

• Algorthimic Penalty: This is where your site has triggered a safeguard built into Google's algorithm and Google has automatically devalued your site.

How do you remove Google Penalties?

My approach to removing Google penalties is threefold:

1. First, I perform a deep dive content audit, taking in considerations such as keyword density, cloaking, duplicate content and over-optimisation of both onpage content and factors such as page titles and headers.

2. Next, I look at your backlink profile and identify any links that are negatively affecting your ranking. These are closed down by either contacting the site owners or disavowing the links.

3. If necessary, I will work with you to submit a reconsideration request to Google to get your site reinstated. This is only needed if you have received a manual penalty which is unusual (most penalties are algortithmic ones).

Nobody wants a Google penalty.The consequences of receiving a manual action can be devastating: lost organic search visibility, traffic, and revenue.

If youre uncertain as to whether your site has a penalty and of what type, or would like to understand if it is at risk because of its link profile, then don;t hesitate to get in touch for a free consultation.

One of the main aspects of Search Engine Optimisation is producing and distributing great content. Having quality content both on your site, and sites that link to you, will boost your search engine rankings. Conversely, having poor content on your site or having spammy content link back to you can do just the opposite.

Content can help or hinder your website's search engine rankings

Search engine algorithms are designed to detect content that was written for the sole purpose of boosting search engine traffic and using such tactics can quite easily result in Google penalties. Bad content truly can do long-lasting damage to your website, brand and business. Duplicative or unnecessary website content can also hold you back from your true ranking potential.

My Content Marketing Service

There are a lot of ways to approach content marketing, but I specifically focus on two areas that will help to push your site up the Google search rankings. These are content creation and content distribution:

Content Creation for Search Engine Optimisation

• All the content I produce is professionally written and edited to produce consistent and quality content for your business.
• I focus on creating content that grows your organic search engine traffic.
• The content created is evergreen and earns SEO results with all of the major search engines.

So how do I do this?

I perform keyword analysis to determine the best keywords to drive traffic to your website. From this, I produce compelling long form content to engage with both customers and Google. This content is then edited and is then ready use on your own website or to distribute elsewhere on the internet.

Content Distribution

If the content is to be distributed, I then work out the best distribution channel for you based on your budget, industry and customer base. My focus here is on getting the new content indexed by Google and getting high quality links back to your site.

The distribution could be to:

• a blog in your industry
• a press release about a newsworthy event
• a social media platform
• an online publication.

When Google discovers your content with a link back to your site, it will be seen as a positive indicator for your site and will help move you up the Google search results.

How well written your content is and how much it brings value to the searcher is paramount to its success on Google's SERPs. Google wants to see that you have a legitimate site with legitimate traffic. This means your content needs to be stellar.

Content marketing is the backbone of my SEO and link building strategy. Producing and distributing great content will make a real difference to your SEO campaigns.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to discuss my SEO services further and arrange a free initial discussion.

Competitor analysis is incredibly important to any search engine optimisation strategy. Understanding who your competitors are and how they are positioned gives us a much better understanding of what our approach should be for the optimisation of your site. Competitive analysis helps to reveal such things as traffic sources, content and, importantly, gaps in your competitor's strategy that we can target.

SEO competitor analysis or competitor research helps understand what tactics are working for your industry and what direction we should take to improve your keyword rankings. Equipped with this understanding, we can shape and prioritise your SEO strategy accordingly. Our own approach can then be determined including aspects such as how long it will take and what tools and resources need to be utilised to outperform them.

My Approach to Competitive Analysis

I try and approach competitive analysis through the lens of my client. You want to rank higher than your competitors. To do this, we need to establish who your main competitors are, what keywords they are ranking for and then identify a content marketing and link building strategy for you to overtake them in the Google rankings.

Identify Competitors

A competitor is someone who targets the same audience and pursues the same business objectives as you. You will probably know who your main competitors are. If you don't, do a Google search or talk to your prospective customers. When you've identified who your customers are I can then start analysing their content, traffic, focused keywords and backlinks.

Theres a good possibility your competitors are using the same keywords as you, and they are most likely outranking you, too. By reviewing their ranking keywords and identifying high authority backlinks to their sites, we can put together an SEO strategy for success.

Keyword Analysis

An important facet of competitive analysis for SEO is keyword analysis. During this phase, I'll analyse the keywords that your competitors are ranking for as well as keyword competitiveness and keyword volumes.

Keyword volumes are an important aspect here as understanding this metric will help determine how much traffic you'll get if you target these keywords.

You may also be ranking for your customer's keywords or you may not. If you're not, we can organise new content on your site to help you rank for them and build up backlinks as part of the process. If you are already ranking for these target keywords, we can strengthen your content and add contextual backlinks to improve your ranking.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are one of the most significant factors that decide how a website ranks in search engines. Monitoring your competitors backlink profiles in addition to your own is a good way to monitor your progress. This monitoring will help identify backlinks for you to take advantage of to benefit your site's rankings.

Work With Me

My goal is to stop prospective clients being enticed to your competitor's website instead of yours. You dont want to lose a prospective client looking for your website because you rank lower on the search engine results page.

If you want to understand how your competitors are ranking higher than you in Google then get in touch with me. I'lll help you formulate a plan to grow your online presence and become an authority leader.

A common question I get asked is why isn't my site listed on Google? There are usually some simple answers to this question and this tutorial runs through most of them.

Finding out why a site isnt in the Google index can be done by a process of elimination.

Here are the steps that you can take to find out why a site isnt on Google:

Check to see if a site is in the Google index

The first thing that youll need to check is whether your site has been indexed by Google. The easy way to do this is by using the site: command in Google itself.

Go to Google and type in the URL for your site:

site:www.mysite.com

(If you want to check on a particular URL or page then you can type in site:mysite.com/a-page.html)

If Google returns no results then it means that youre not in Googles search index. If you have some results then it means that you are.

If youre not in the search results then youll need to proceed to the next steps to address this problem.

Check that youre not blocking the Google crawlers

Google sends out crawlers (or search engine spiders) around the Internet to find links to web pages. When it finds pages that it feels meet its quality guidelines then it adds them to its index. If youre blocking the crawlers then your site wont get indexed by Google.

There are two ways that your site can block search engine spiders:

1. By using a robots.txt file to block Google
2. By using a meta robots tag

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can't request from your site. It lives in the root directory of your website, for example, https://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

If you have a robots.txt file and it contains something like this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

then it will block Google from indexing the site. If you want Google and all other search engines to access your site then simply remove the robots.txt file.

As mentioned above, the second way to block Google spiders from accessing your site is by using the meta robots tag. If youre using Wordpress then the creating/deletion of this can be managed from the admin interface.

The meta robot tag is located in the

<meta name='robots' content='follow,index'>

If your meta robot tag contains the words noindex then it wont be indexed. To get the site into Googles index, either remove the tag or replace the noindex directive with the word index. Youll then need to wait for Google to crawl your site and all the pages within.

Still no luck? Try spoofing the user agent

If the pages dont appear to be blocked and the page is still not indexed, try visiting the page whilst spoofing a Google user agent.

If you want to see what your site looks like from a search engine spiders perspective then there are several browser plugins that allow you to do this. One of these is the Firefox User Agent Switcher but there are others depending on the browser that you use.

Does Google know about your site?

If your website is not indexed and Googlebot is not blocked, the problem may be that Google does not know about your site.

If you have a Google Search Console account, you can remedy this by submitting your content to Google. A Google Search Console account is free to anyone with a Google account.

Is your content unique?

To find out if the content on your pages is unique, find some random text on your site and copy it. Now paste this into a Google search in quotes. If you find another site comes up for your search string it may mean that your content is duplicate content which Google doesnt like.

This will mean that the content for this page is more authoritative than yours and it may cause your site to not be indexed.

Do you have a sitemap?

If your website doesnt have a sitemap then you should think about adding one. Search engines such as Google like sitemaps as they provide an information hierarchy for the website and therefore make it easier for them to index.

Adding a sitemap to your Google Search Console account will ensure that Google knows about every page on your site.

Do you have links to your site?

In simple terms, ranking on Google is like a popularity contest. If your site is linked to by other sites then Google will see you as being authoritative.

If your site doesnt have enough links then this may be why you are not listed. To address this, add links to your site from pages that are already listed. You can also add internal links too from other pages on your site - internal links are not quite as good as external links but they indicate to Google that they are important pages.

If you still have no pages indexed after looking at all the above options then you may need extra help. You may have been affected by Google penalties or may have been bombarded by negative links. If this is the case, it may be wise to employ the services of a SEO specialist who can help repair your situation. Ive been working on search engine optimisation for over 20 years now and would be more than happy to give you some friendly advice based on your situation. If you need help, drop me a line and Ill see if I can help.