2 Reasons Your Cloud Services Website Isn’t Getting Found on Google

While Google never has and probably never will publicly disclose all of the rules for getting a website to organically rank for important search terms, Google does publish Webmaster Guidelines which explain best practices for getting Google to find, crawl, and index your website. There’s certainly a lot to know. But at a more basic, fundamental level, there are two big reasons why cloud services websites are often not getting found organically on Google.

Frequency of Website Updates

All too often, the owners of small cloud services companies aren’t realistic about what’s needed to generate targeted website traffic. As a result, cloud services websites are often gorgeous works of art, out to achieve some kind of brand splash. And that’s certainly OK to a certain degree, as we know for example that visual content – on websites like Flickr, Pinterest, and Instagram – can be incredibly popular.

However it becomes a massive problem when 100% of online marketing resources and budget are allocated towards branding and aesthetics, to the detriment of content creation and the user experience. See 11 Signs Your IT Consulting Website Was Built by Barbie and Ken Dolls.

Eye candy isn’t enough anymore. Google and visitors are largely motivated by your words.

10 years ago, it was OK to have a static 20- to 30-page brochure website. Today, if you need to turn strangers into website visitors, and then convert those visitors into leads, you must think differently.

Google has been able to measure website update frequency pretty much since day one. It knows exactly how often you add new pages to your website. And other things being equal, a competitor that updates its website more frequently than yours has a good chance of outranking your cloud services website.

So the frequency of website updates turns out to be pretty highly correlated with how often Google indexes your website, as well as the ultimate organic search ranking and resulting website traffic that you can reasonably expect to generate – if the strategy and execution are handled properly.

But that’s not the whole story.

User Experience and the Stickiness Factor

It turns out that Google also knows a great deal about the user experience that your website visitors have when they engage with your website.

So many of us now spend large portions of our days logged into Google-owned service such as Google+, Google Apps, Google accounts, and Gmail. And then there’s all the user data collected from Google-powered  devices such as Android smartphones and tablets, Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, and even more recently, Chromecasts. By having tens of millions of data points a day like this, the Google search engine can make a pretty solid educated guess on your website’s stickiness and relevancy.

So if your cloud services website content sucks, or is just plain boring and unengaging, you’re providing a pretty lousy user experience.

But it isn’t just those users, whose time you’ve wasted, that care anymore. Google cares too, a lot!

The search giant wants to provide its website searchers with a terrific user experience. On the flip side, Google knows that if it consistently sends its users to crappy websites with a poor user experience, those users will become disillusioned with Google and defect to the Yahoo! or Bing search engine.

If visitors are landing on your website and a significant percentage of people hit the back button a few seconds later (and “bounce”), Google knows about this in real time and adjusts how it ranks your website.

In this post, we looked at why it’s critical for cloud services websites to be updated frequently with remarkable content that its website visitors really want to read and engage with.

What have you found to be most important for getting your website to consistently organically rank for important searches phrases? Let us know in the Comments section below.

And to figure out where frequency of website updates and the stickiness factors fits in with the rest of your website traffic generation and lead generation needs, download your free copy of the IT Channel Inbound Marketing Planning Guide. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr ullrich.c