Customer Acquisition
As someone relatively new to the web-app world, I've struggled with building something that follows the generally accepted principles. This caused some serious issues with both functionality and the ability to get organic traffic to the site.
It was definitely worth dragging myself through the mud to learn all these things first hand though as I'll be much more prepared for the next one. Moving from EE to web s/w has been a slow start for me but I feel like I've got a bit of a stride going which is really rewarding.
It seems like building blog posts on things is one of the most effective ways to bring organic traffic to your site so I've started really pushing to do that more. I wrote about how to find a car meet near you, finding a car club and some others aiming at a minimum of 1200+ words each. I use SEMrush to try and focus on specific areas that might be rankable but it seems even that hasn't done me too well unfortunately. It could well be a time thing and I need to let it exist for a little longer as the site is ~2 months old.
Are there other things I should be focused on the make sure my site doesn't sit out in the ether? Would love suggestions
Also, if you're into cars - I'm build a virtual car show platform and would love to have some partners or advisors. I'm technical - MSEE from Caltech - but as mentioned still getting into the sw side.
Or, you can just read about some photography tips
@qosha - I took a look at one of the articles, and your site, and some things stand out to me.
Not saying that's specifically a problem with your forum articles showing up in SERPs, but the harder it is for Google to figure out what kind of content it is, the less likely it will show up high in SERPS.
Your H2 tags don't seem to have any keyword/phrases in them. If you're trying to target a keyword/phrase (like "find car meet"), then at least some of your H2 tags should contain your keyword/phrase or synonyms.
When you search Google for any content on your domain, it only returns 9 links. In looking at your sitemap, I see the following:
So, this tells me that you have not yet submitted your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console or Google hasn't indexed your site yet.
But for sure, you need to make sure you take care of #1-3 above.
Hope the information helps.
Hey @iammike that is very helpful, thanks a bunch for taking the time! I actually hadn't seen anything re schemas so I likely would have missed that. I will get that set up.
Makes sense with the H2 tags, I had focused on title/meta/h1 but sort of forgot about the h2/h3 tags.
I'm a little confused here. If you search site:topmarq.com, I get 7 results. But, if you search site: topmarq.com car meets, you get 4 results, 3 of which didn't show up for the original search. So my understanding is that they are indexed... does that just mean they're too new? or it doesnt trust my site? I've googled this but don't seem to have any good info.
Yup very new! Just trying to get everything setup as well as possible so that once I get out of the 'sandbox' it'll move quickly hopefully.
@qosha - The only thing I can think of is that Google doesn't yet fully understand the content or structure of your site.
The 3 that show up 'site:topmarq.com car meets' look like articles. There may be some site hierarchy that is preventing Google from fully associating them to the root domain. I'm just guessing here.
Do you have your site setup in Google Search Console? If not, you should do it. Once you go into GSC, you can submit your sitemap(s).
Here's a good read:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/why-is-my-website-not-showing-up-on-google/
Of course if you have submitted a sitemap and all of your pages are in the Google index, but they are not showing up under certain search conditions, it's just because your site is new or Google doesn't consider the pages relevant yet.
Oh, I'd also recommend not using a big feature image as the very first thing in your content, especially not the articles. If I have to scroll down most of the page just to get to the content, it's not a very good visiting experience. I suspect Google bot would think the same thing too.
Gotcha. Ok that makes sense. I'll look through and try to make sure the structure fits what is expected and then just maybe wait a bit for google to go through and re-index. I have made lots of changes in a short time so it may be that Google is not indexing as frequently given the 0 DA and poor site structure.
I have submitted the sitemap to GSC and it says they're all indexed.
Thanks for the read, I'll take a look.
Interesting point re-images. I'll move them down into the first paragraph somewhere.
Appreciate all the help!