Total SEO failure

Marketing
1

I am a total SEO loser.

In the past I had a regular day job and recently I picked up my own client. This experience leaves me feeling very incompetent… :cry:

The site is less than 10 pages, but I built what I feel is a good quality site with solid content.

When I Google a popular search phrase my client comes up between page 10-15. Two articles I wrote aren’t even indexed which burns me up since I took a weekend to write just one of them!

I think we get like 30 hits a day, and I can’t figure out Google Analytics - I think it’s junk. But I suspect that 28 hits are bots and 2 hits are me checking the site each day.

The owner is backing off on me and doesn’t seem to want to spend anymore, and I feel like a total failure.

Can you believe he hasn’t even had his family or friends visit his own new site?

I want to try and get permission to do marketing, but then again why work for free?

I wish someone could just help me understand SEO and know what to do to make this site indexed and ranked reasonably.

It hurts to see your work get ignored by everyone…

I feel this is all my fault and that I am not nearly as smart in IT as I once thought…

And if I don’t do something quick, the owner will never spend another dime and I just wasted a month of my life building a nice site that no one will ever see or use…

1 Like
2

Did you submit a sitemap.xml file?

3

About 10-14 days ago…

4

Hmmm, that’s odd. It may not get crawled instantly but it shouldn’t take that long.

No robots.txt file or htaccess rewrites that might be causing a problem?

Can the page be accessed without logging in?

5

My robots.txt is empty.

I use .htaccess redirects for nice looking URL’s, but nothing fancy.

The site has no concept of accounts or logging in. Everything is available at all times.

6

From Google Search Console:

  • No manual webspam actions found.
  • 0 Pages Blocked by robots
  • No blocked resources detected. Be sure to check all site variants.
  • No errors detected in the last 90 days. Nice!
  • Sitemaps: 8 pages submitted, 6 indexed
  • Currently, we haven’t detected any security issues with your site’s content.
7

Hmmm, it doesn’t make sense.

Nobody can guarantee where or even if a page will show in the results.

But you’ve let Google know the page exists.
Nothing is stopping them from getting to it.
You’ve given them time to index it (more than enough time IMHO).

It should at least be indexed by now.

8

Are the two articles not indexed referenced properly in your sitemap.xml? Can you take the url out of the sitemap.xml and load it in a browser?

9

Thanks for the feedback.

My bigger concern is that I feel like I have no clue what I am doing. At this point the owner isn’t giving me any more support or money, which is a shame because I feel the 200+ hours I put into this is at best half way.

Even if I was being paid moving forward, who wants to sweat over writing more articles and adding more site features if the world never sees your website.

I have always mocked things not in this article: 2Mb Web Pages: Who’s to Blame? Well, guess what? A simply design without cruft and good content hasn’t help this website one bit!!!

10

Each has a priority of 1.00 → because I think good content is the most important thing on a website!

I just copied and pasted each article URL and they load fine

11

Okay that rules out user error which is always good to do. Unfortunately that is where my knowledge ends. I’ll do some searching tomorrow but hopefully someone better with SEO can give you some sound advice.

12

Keep in mind thaty most of what’s in the sitemap.xml file are more like suggestions than directives.
AFAIK, Google makes it’s own decision about when it will visit and how important it is despite what changefreq and priority are.

<url>
	<loc>http://www.somesite.com/</loc>
	<lastmod>2015-05-02</lastmod>
	<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
	<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
1 Like
13

As I’ve said in other threads, you don’t get overnight success in Google. It can take a good year to get any decent results in my experience, but they do come. In the mean time, backlinks and all that.

The best thing to learn from this is that building a site implies nothing about marketing or getting found. If someone asks a builder to construct a shop in the desert, it’s not his fault if it gets no customers. You have to make this clear to a client, and have proper payment agreements in place.

There’s still a lot of starry-eyed naivety about what the internet offers. In reality, there’s usually no pot of gold at the end of the Internet rainbow. Mostly you just find a pile of flyblown horse dung, if you’re lucky.

3 Likes
14

@ralphm,

So is my time wasted on continuing to add more quality content (before we get traffic)?

Or should I try and convince my client to pay me to hit the streets and start promoting his business?

15

16

Hi,

I am not expert to comment, but what i understand is you would have made on WordPress site and focus more with keywords on SMO part. SMO is much faster than SEO… WordPress is best which help you in page ranking…

17

Not necessarily, because over time it will rise up the ranks if it’s useful. But don’t base your next mortgage on it or anything. It will have a subtle effect on business, if anything.

I don’t understand why you are responsible for the content, though. I would let the client get of his tush and do it himself.

Not unless you find out how to do it properly. Marketing is a science like anything else.

18

[quote=“Google”]Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all pages
of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.[/quote]

@aplusdesignagency - we appreciate your willingness to contribute, but as you can see, @mikey_w is a complete beginner when it comes to promoting a site. So it’s not very helpful to say

[quote=“aplusdesignagency, post:16, topic:191914”]
focus more with keywords on SMO part. SMO is much faster than SEO
[/quote]Please explain clearly what you mean by SMO and what are the first steps you think mikey_w should take to implement this strategy.

19

You’ve given some sage advice on these topics, although it doesn’t help me impress my client any. sigh

Cue song: “You Can’t Hurry Love” :wink:

20

Because he runs an auto-repair garage. What does he know about writing?

I would love to do that, but if I don’t get paid it is hard…

True, but if you are an entrepreneur - or helping one as in my case - you often have to do “trial by fire”!!