Even after following all the best practices to improve your website's search engine optimization, your site may still not appear at the top of search results.
Here are a few common reasons why that might be the case:
- You have two websites
- Your topics are highly competitive
- You just launched your website
- You've restricted page visibility to certain members
- I can find my site in search results, but my members can't. Why?
You have two websites
Some nonprofits keep their original website while finishing their new Springly site, running both at the same time. In this case, the authority and age of your original site will negatively affect how your Springly site ranks in search engines.
If you want to keep both sites running during the transition, here are a few ways to make it smoother:
Add a redirect link from your original site to your new Springly site
Add a link to your Springly site (via a banner or button) on the home page of your original site. This link from your established, high-authority site will also help boost the authority of your new Springly site!
Publish new content exclusively on your Springly site
The main risk of keeping the same content on both sites is that search engines will favor the original site every time.
On top of that, copy-pasting content from your original site to your Springly site means that content isn't new — and search engines won't give it any credit.
Worse still, it can actively hurt your SEO.
If you need to bring over historical content from your original site, you can create blog articles and set the canonical URL (pointing to the original source) using the article SEO tool. See this article to learn more.
When you're ready, transfer your domain name from your original site to your Springly site.
Your topics are highly competitive
Search engine rankings are a competitive arena — the most active players get the spotlight. If your nonprofit focuses on wellness, for example, you're competing with every other wellness organization on the internet!
To rank effectively and stand out from the crowd, you need clear differentiators that set your site apart.
These differentiators can be as straightforward as your geographic location or the specific focus of your nonprofit's activities.
In highly competitive topic areas, how often you update your site — publishing news, refreshing pages, and so on — also plays a significant role in your rankings.
You just launched your website
In that case, don't worry. Think of SEO as a marathon, not a sprint.
SEO takes time — that's normal
Search engine crawlers need to find and read your content. The more content you give them — and the more unique it is — the faster your site will climb in the rankings.
Even if you publish frequently right from the start — say, one article per day — your site will likely still take several weeks to climb in search results. Many factors are at play, including your site's content and structure, as well as how many competitors exist in your topic area.
Keep up the effort
Reaching the top of search results doesn't mean you'll stay there. To hold your position, you'll need to keep updating and creating content consistently. A good rule of thumb is to publish an article every one to two weeks.
You've restricted page visibility to certain members
Pages published on your website are visible to everyone by default. However, you can change the visibility settings so that certain pages are only accessible to specific members of your community.
Those pages won't be indexed by search engines, meaning they won't appear in search results — they'll only be visible to the logged-in members you've granted access to.
To learn more about page visibility settings, check out this article.
I can find my site in search results, but my members can't. Why?
Most search engines are smart — they personalize results based on what you tend to visit. Your own site is one of those, so the more you visit it, the higher it appears in your personal search results.
That won't necessarily be true for your members, who probably don't visit your site nearly as often as you do!
To get a more realistic picture of what your members actually see, try searching in a private browsing window. You may find that your site doesn't rank as highly as it does in your regular browser.
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