New website on Google

[Sarah1203]

Hi could anyone have a look at www.westcountrylupins.co,uk and see if there is a problem with it? If I try and list a plant to find which we stock, the site does not come up on Google anywhere that I can see.
Thanks

[John Ennals]

Hi Sarah

I searched for 'Lupinus Westcountry' in Google and you came up as number one, then I tried 'Clematis Allanah' and you were 5th from the top so it looks like Google is indexing your pages.

You could increase your prominence by using Google Shopping ads, which is what I do although there is a cost associated with it. Try searching for 'Britains Floral Garden Lupins' (my lupins are the very small plastic variety).

Incidentally, Bing/Yahoo accepts shopping ad feed files in the same format as Google.

John

[Sarah1203]

Hi thanks yes if you search us by name it comes up but not by plants such as Corydalis Beth Evans or Clematis Winter Beauty for example.

[John Ennals]

Hi thanks yes if you search us by name it comes up but not by plants such as Corydalis Beth Evans or Clematis Winter Beauty for example.

I searched using two plant varieties, one of which was Lupinus Westcountry.

However, the two examples you give do not show up - were they added to the site later than the two I used? I have the same issue with Google, some products show up and some don't, and there doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. Maybe Google is trying to coerce us into using paid advertising by only showing a limited proportion of pages from our sites?

John

[Mike Hughes]

"Clematis Winter Beauty": Position 32 in google
"Corydalis Beth Evans": Position 38 in google.

From an SEO perspective there's very little plain text content on the page and what there is doesn't include your keywords.

Mike

[Matt Price]

As Mike pointed out, it does seem that you pages for those phrases mentioned are in fact indexed. There is a great deal of difference between being indexed for a phrase and ranking for it in search engines.

You can usually get a page to index pretty quickly via a few ways;

1. Google the term "submit url to google" (without quotes). This search now gives a knowledge box at the top of the search results which lets you tell Google about your new URL.

2. Within Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) ensure that the latest version of your website's sitemap.xml is added. If you have added a lot of new pages/products then it is a good idea to resubmit this.

3. There is another tool within Google Search Console (under the 'Crawl' menu) called 'Fetch As Google'. Submit your URL in that tool and click the 'Request Indexing' link. Often this crawls the page straight away. If the page is high enough quality and relevant it should start ranking relatively soon afterwards as well.

One way to tell if a page/URL is indexed is to use the 'site:' search parameter in Google.
e.g:
site:westcountrylupins.co.uk Clematis Winter Beauty

This will show you all the pages relevant for that phrase on your website. You can also do a specific URL.
e.g:
site:westcountrylupins.co.uk/acatalog/Clematis-urophylla--Winter-Beauty--2618.html

If the page you are looking for shows, then it is indexed. If you can't see it when you search, then you need to identify why it is not ranking well.

In terms of ranking, again, as Mike said, the reason you are possibly lower down in the search results for this phrase is most likely down to having little content on the page. Bulk it up a bit with some additional information and you should see an increase.

[Sarah1203]

Hi thanks for the replies. Bit disappointing as we have had the site redone recently but it may be that I need to add a lot more text ?

[Matt Price]

Nice post webzavi. This is great advice for anyone looking for a strategy in getting a site ranking.

One minor thing - I think the statement below is a little misleading.

Having a Google Adword campaign also boosts your organic search indexing. Having an Ad that is based on your name of business helps boost your SEO

I don't *think* you are trying to say that using Adwords will improve the ranking position of a site in Google, but this sentence perhaps gives that impression if someone is approaching SEO with no prior knowledge.

I agree that having an Adwords campaign will help in terms of putting your brand name in front of more people before you are necessarily ranking organically on page 1 for many terms. It can then encourage more brand searches from returning customers, which in turn might result in some positive impact on organic search performance.

In addition, if you are ranking on page 1 organically as well as appearing in Adwords positions then it gives you greater visibility on that first page and may well improve the changes of someone clicking on your link, rather than that of a competitor who only appears in either Adwords or organic positions.

However, Adwords and organic search are handled completely separately by Google. Having an Adwords campaign will not directly improve your organic search rankings. Adwords bots that crawl your landing page for quality are different bots than those which crawl for search indexing so I've seen little evidence that it will increase the speed of indexing - certainly the best option for quicker indexing would still be using the Fetch As Google tool in Search Console.

There are a great many positive reasons why any business should be using Google Adwords, but I have yet to see evidence to suggest that it gives anything other than minor, indirect improvements in any organic search performance.