If you search for your website and it doesn’t appear in the first page of results in Google, the chances are that potential clients won’t find you. But don’t fret, there’s a solution. Here’s how to do it.

Patience and SEO

If you only recently published your website, you’re going to have to be patient. The newest sites don’t tend to get ranked instantly on Google. It’s likely you’ll have to click through the pages with Google search results to find your website. Bear in mind that there’s content which is similar to yours on the internet, dating back further and which people have purposefully worked on to position it.

But keep your chin up, by following a series of steps you can do it too. The first thing you need to know is that your web is listed in the Google index. To check this, access Google and search for site:elteudomini.barcelona (instead of elteudomini.barcelona type the name of your own domain).

If no results show up it means that Google doesn’t know that your website exists. In this case you need to find out why it is not listed. One way of checking is to register your domain with Google Search Console.

If you find some results, you’re on the right track and Google knows your site exists. In this case you will need to work on your SEO to improve the position of your site and gain visibility.

Finding the keywords you need

If you want your customers to find you on Google you need to speak the same language. Perhaps you’re using words that are too technical or too generic for the texts on your website. The more generic your keywords are, the more difficult it will be to position your site, as you’ll be competing with a lot of others. A .barcelona domain will help you achieve a better position in searches using the name of your city as a keyword and on the map.

Think about who your audience is. For instance, if your business is travel, instead of using travel as a key word you could use family travel, weekend getaways, group travel, travelling with kids and so on.

If you’re unsure of the words your customers use for Google searches, you can carry out a keyword study. We suggest you start by brainstorming words and phrases you think they might use in a search. Bear in mind:

• Products and services: what customers look for when they want to purchase, for instance, travel Barcelona.
• Problems customers have: what they look for to solve these, for instance, how to book a pet-friendly hotel in Barcelona.
• Desired results: when they know what they’re looking for, for instance, booking a pet-friendly hotel in Barcelona.
• Characteristics: when they search for details on your products, for instance, pet-friendly hotel Barcelona.

Once you’ve got a list of possible keywords and phrases, you can find out how frequently people search for them on Google and what competition you’re facing. Various SEO tools can help you find this information. One of the most widely used is the Google Ads keyword planner.

In the ‘Ideas’ section for keywords you can type some of the words or phrases from your list to see the monthly average number of searches for each of them and how competitive they are (high, medium or low). The tool also suggests related phrases which could be used.

All you need to do to use this tool is configure a free account with Google Ads.

Each keyword in its place

Once you’ve identified the keywords and phrases for your website, you need to include them in the right place to optimise your website and improve your position in Google searches.

Think about which keywords are best suited to each of the pages on your website. You probably won’t put the same ones on the home page as you will on a page for a specific page or blog entry. Each page has different information which will fit in better with the keywords on the list you’re working with.

Once you’ve chosen them, you’ll need to include them in various places:

• Title: SEO experts affirm this is the most important place when it comes to adding a keyword. Even though you don’t see it directly when accessing content on a site, it is the word that gets highlighted in search results.
• Meta description: This information is not in view when you visit a website, but it is when you do a search. It is usually the same text which appears beneath the title when you do a search.
• Heading and subtitles: When we edit pages we find HTML tags which go from H1 to H6. These heading tags are for titles within the content which tend to appear highlighted within the text. Many visits will only focus on these parts, so it’s important they are well-written and highlight the words we want to draw attention to.
• Links within the website: In addition to external links which direct users to your page (such as those on social media), you can also include links from an internal page to another within your website. Instead of linking these with generic texts such as “click here” or “more information”, use texts with a description for the link.

A page for each section

If you’re starting out, perhaps you’ve put all the information into a single page within your website. We suggest you create a page for each of the sections of your website. Google, or any other search engine, prefers each page to have specific content.

This way you can put your keywords to good use, explain each section in detail, add photos, videos and work your links well too.

All these steps will help you improve your position on Google, and as we said at the beginning, patience, to give Google time to index all the information and changes on your website and get it higher up in search results.