Noticed keywords saying "not yet ranked"? This article is here to help you understand what it means!
Keywords that are mentioned on your dashboard as "not yet ranked" are positioned somewhere past page 10 on Google for your website. Our rank tracker on the dashboard tracks where your keywords are ranking on Google for your unique website.
Keywords under the Keyword column is the exact term someone would type into Google to find search results.
We only track positions up to page 10/up to 100 positions.
Essentially we are aiming for your keywords to be positioned on the top 10 pages of Google in order for us to further optimise these closer to the required first page position. Our first goal is to achieve your site to appear within the top 10 pages of Google so we can further optimise these closer to page one.
Here's an example:
Client example would like to rank on Google for anyone that searches "estate sales"
The keyword will remain as "not yet ranked" until it starts showing on the top 10 pages of Google (top 100 positions)
The following column you will see is Rank Improvement
This column tracks how many positions your website has moved with that particular keyword . If the keyword is still stating "not yet ranked" and has not moved in the past, you will more than likely notice under the "rank improvement" column stating 0. This simply means the keyword hasn't had a chance to move onto the top 10 pages of Google just yet and requires more time with further optimisation.
Once a keyword starts to move you will notice figures appear in green on the rank tracker, this is all positive improvements as your site is being discovered by Google. At the same time, once the keyword starts moving, you will notice iit appearing positive and negative figures throughout, as Google needs to stabilise the keyword somewhere in place. This can take weeks or even months, depending on how hard the keyword is to rank.
Why do you have keywords that are past page ten?
There's a number of reasons as to why you site hasn't appeared organically with certain keywords on the top 10 pages of Google.
Below are a few factors considered with Google:
Your website has just gone live or is less than 12 months old:
As soon as a website goes live, it needs to be indexed by your developer on Google in order to go into the search engine results. This will show Google's artificial intelligence that there is a new website with new content to be recognised (think about it like a filing system) Simply being indexed on Google is never going to be enough for Google to show your site in the search results for relevant terms.
At first you may notice your site takes a while to start appearing for your company name, the more generic brand/company name, the longer it will take for the algorithm to show your site on page one.
Next, it's all about timing. If a website has plenty of content and plenty of pages indexed on Google, it does have better chances of building up a natural trust with Google. By leaving a site only indexed on Google and not actively blogging, creating backlinks, having SEO on the site etc... you will find your site will struggle to be found for any keywords you wish to appear for.
Your website is older than 12 months:
Age is just one factor considered with Google, in most cases if a site is more than 2 years old it is more than likely already appearing on the top 10 pages of Google with a few keywords already, even if the site didn't have any SEO in the past. This happens because Google runs through it's own checks on every unique website. If the algorithm finds a website deserves to rank for certain keywords, then it will simply start showing that site somewhere on the top 10 pages of Google.
If your website is older than 2 years old, we have tools to identify whether there are any keywords that you already appear with, and we can further optimise these to get closer to page one.
There are cases where a site is older than 2 years and doesn't rank for any relevant keywords that we can further promote. In this case, after our research into competitors, your content and what keywords are achievable, we will locate keywords that are "not yet ranked" on the top 10 pages of Google. These are considered newly discovered keywords and more than likely will take longer to achieve ranks on the top 10 pages.
There is very little written content on the site:
As an important advisory we mention homepage content, if we find a website has less than 700 words, our first report will advise to increase the content on the site.
The content available on any website, is the only information that Google's AI can recognise and read. The more available wording on a website, the easier it is for Google to recognise exactly what your site offers. This needs to be carefully constructed as every page requires a certain amount of "average word count" this is where we need to research more into your competitors. Our SEO account managers can help you with this advice.
Bear this in mind, we need to be careful with content and what is written, as you don't want to go in and start repeating the keywords within your content as this is very bad practice. We offer professional SEO content writing services to help achieve nicely structured, user friendly, easy to read SEO content.
Should you need any advice as to what your site needs in order to help the SEO campaign become a success, please contact our SEO account managers.
There are many more factors involved, our teams are always here to help, please check out other articles to learn more!