One of the primary focuses of any brand seeking to boost its visibility is to increase its reach through search engine results. While there are many different search engines that can be targeted on a global scale, many people focus on Google given its huge share of the search market throughout most countries.

Search engine optimization is the easiest way to boost visibility in search results without spending money and can produce highly beneficial results with consistent effort and dedication. However, some brands may find themselves making no progress after a period of time – even if the amount of effort and time spent should have already yielded some results.

Today, we’ll look at some of the most common reasons why your brand may still not be showing up in Google’s search results.

Something Is Blocking Google

It might seem silly, but some websites make a tragic mistake when pursuing SEO: they accidentally block Google from being able to read their pages. There are two main types of errors in this situation. One involves preventing Google from indexing pages, while the other involves preventing Google from crawling your pages.

If you’re pinging to Google indicators via your robots.txt file or through noindex tags, then the search engine will ignore your pages in one or more ways. Ultimately, verifying that you do not have noindex tags active on your pages and/or instructions in your robots.txt file to not crawl the pages should always be done. While most content management systems do not automatically configure pages in this fashion, it is worth checking if your pages simply aren’t ranking after much effort.

You’re Short on Links

Focusing on the creation of high-quality content along with keywords and optimal site design are core tenets of SEO, but they are not inherent guarantees for progress. If your pages are languishing outside of Google’s prime search results for months or even years, then it may be a case of lacking backlinks.

Earning links from other websites in your niche and/or sites that have authority with Google is critical to improving your rankings. Ultimately, Google views websites without backlinks as sources that cannot necessarily be trusted or verified in terms of content, authority and credibility. However, the creation of good content coupled with various promotional efforts should help your brand earn links over time – if you’ve been lacking in this area, then make focusing on it a top priority.

You’ve Been Penalized

Last but not least, a lack of ranking despite creating high quality content optimized for search engines could be due to one or more penalties applied by Google. There are two types of penalties: manual penalties and algorithmic penalties. Those who have been penalized are most often guilty of pinging to Google indicators of duplicate content, quality issues or issues with compliance of Google’s guidelines. You can use Google’s Search Console to determine whether or not your site is the victim of any penalties.

Genuine effort is required to rank prominently in Google’s results, but not always a guarantee. There are numerous reasons why your pages may not be ranking: follow the above advice to verify whether any of these three common causes are the reason why your SEO efforts are falling flat.