Why is getting your website to appear high in a google search so difficult?!?!?

[whatsagoodusername]

Just letting off steam really - although I'd be grateful for any advice too :)
I've set up a small business supporting independent authors with book covers, layout etc. I've worked in the industry for a while, and am aiming to build something that, whilst not making me rich, brings in an income whilst giving me flexibility to juggle 2DSs.

Since setting the site up, I've been diligently blogging every day and have been learning all about things like Twitter and Reddit, but I'm still only getting a small handful of impressions every day. I've read that I need to build incoming links to my site, but have no idea how to do this other than to keep writing blog posts and sharing them in the hope that someone decides to share them.

I know it takes time, and I know I just have to stick with it, but its SO frustrating and I don't really feel I'm making any progress.

That's it really - feel better getting that off my chest :). I'm off to get a and some .

Website is here if anyone wants to take a peek: www.coverandlayout.com

Well if course you can pay Google to get a better listing (a shame I know, but Google is the biggest company in the world, largely from advertising revenue for a reason!). The other option is to pay an Internet marketing company to generate more traffic for you. You say you are from the industry so I'm sure you know this already though. If this is genuinely intended to be an income earning business then I think you'll have to do some marketing.

Other options would be to find some affiliations with writers groups etc so you can spread the word.

These are just top of my head thoughts

Is there a site that ranks high on Google that you can advertise on? That way when people Google for the services you provide you should come up reasonably high. I found this out quite by accident :)

When people are searching for your type of business what key words or search terms would they be likely to type into Google?

A friend told me that you need to make sure that you use all those keywords A LOT in sentences on pretty much every page of your website, especially the home page.

As far as I know, Google list most popular sites first, so new sites are at an obvious disadvantage .

It's called SEO - search engine oprimisation. You need to have text in your website that the Google algorithms can read and you need to change it. Often.

If you are selling ice cream for example you need to have ice cream mentioned in the pages and have different meta tags so that they will get picked up.

Or you can pay Google!

You need to keep your content rich and up to date, so use blogs, links to other websites etc. Reusing key words repeatedly is a bonus too

Pay per click works well

Thanks all. I'm not ruling out pay-per-click, but think I need to focus on building content right now - otherwise they'll end up arriving, but not staying :)

The main keywords are book; ebook; cover; layout; design - although I my have to add 'cheap' as this seems to be a popular keyword on some competitor sites.

I've just started an online SEO course run by the University of California, so hopefully I'll pick up a few tips that way too!

Feeling a lot more positive now - the and kind comments helped . I know it's going to take time - I'm just impatient and want everything now!

Hi, actually if you over use keywords as suggested, the algorithms will mark you down as spam. It is called keyword overstuffing. Also writing tonnes of content for your blog is not necessarily going to bring in eyeballs.

SEO has changed a lot recently, a lot of the information you find online are 2 - 3 years out of date. Many online marketers use social media ads more than google adwords simply because social media is where we are all spending our time. It is tedious and soul wrenching but the only way to learn is by reading a lot online to find out the new ways to market a website.
and dont rely on any tricks to get your website to the first page of google because google knows all the tricks and would penalise your website into oblivion if you use outmoded tricks like over stuffing keywords.
Just simply target using long tail keywords and medium to low keywords rather than popular.

For example a small shoe shop could never compete for the word shoe as nike and reebok and the big name brands will always come up but if you made red spotty pin up girl shoes google will put you on page 1 for search results using these key phrases.

Bottom line read current SEO guides to understand how SEO works and you can do all the work yourself to bring traffic to your site.

I'm not convinced that such a specialised business will generate much from random Google searches. If I were you I'd be concentrating on linking up with aspiring authors and self publishers through the courses they do and Twitter and people who advise on self publishing.

My website won't come up easily on google unless you know my name but people do know my name because I talk at conferences etc.
Can you get signed up to teach a session on the importance of finer design at a new writing conference or training?

I'm an SEO, ignore the outdated advice such as keyword stuffing, and Google doesn't list the most popular sites first, they rank the most relevant site to the user's query and intent.

As for your targeted terms of "book", "ebook", "layout", "design" you have absolutely no chance of ranking for any of these as they are simply too broad and your site doesn't address the intent of a user searching for "book", or "book design". However, having had a quick look there are over 2000 worldwide searches a month for the search terms "book cover designer", and "ebook cover designer", which is exactly the service you're providing, with thousands more potential searches when you drill down to the more specific terms, so there is a huge potential here if you wanted to invest time/effort/money in ranking for those terms.

Please don't resort to PPC, although its tempting to attempt to get quick results the average CPC of an ad bidding on the term "book cover designer" is around £3, and that's if you know what you're doing with bid adjustments, ad copy, A/B testing of ads, geo/time targetting, ad extensions and so on. This can end up costly if you don't know what you're doing, and unaware of the current conversion rates on your site.

Search for "book cover designer" and "ebook cover designer" and look at the pages that are ranking on the first page, compare their content, layout and page structure to yours, these are the sites you're competing against. Which sites offer the best information? Which site is going to give the user the best experience

There's a few points/questions/ways forward.

• Do you have Google Search Console set up?

• When you're posting content are you connecting to the people who you feel would link back? It's very unlikely that in the early stages of a business/website that you'd naturally acquire links/readers by just posting blog posts and a fair amount of legwork is required to connect with relevant bloggers/websites, asking them to link to your useful resource/fun/informative content that would be interesting to their readers. This is often the stage most people skip.

I'd actually recommend putting a pause on your current content creation efforts, use the SEO knowledge you've got from your course and optimise your existing pages. Your product pages need better content: www.coverandlayout.com/products/interior-layout-text-only giving more information about the service and answering FAQs, have a look at what competitors are doing - www.self-pub.net/services/interior.html is a page that ranks for "interior book designer", a term that you would want your page to rank for, and as you can see, the information is more in depth and helpful to the user, so naturally Google is going to prefer that site over yours.

www.coverandlayout.com/blog/1986-2016-how-have-book-covers-changed This I expect would go down well on the likes of Reddit, or shared on forums/twitter, however I would change the layout so its more Buzzfeed-like.

• Add bolder CTAs

• Have a look into on page SEO structure then optimise your home page, targeting the book cover designer terms, using H1, H2 tags and relevant text.

• Take another look at your Page Title tags, www.coverandlayout.com/products/basic-cover for instance has a title of "Basic Cover - Book Cover Design | Interior Book Design | Cover&Layout" and all/majority of your pages seem to have " Book Cover Design | Interior Book Design | Cover&Layout" in the titles. Firstly, these are too long so they're cut off in the results page, having the same keyword stuffed page titles throughout is quite spammy and does nothing for the user experience. These should be something like: "Basic Book Cover Design | Cover&Layout".

• In the long term you can move to a Wordpress CMS rather than Squarespace, which is an all round better platform for SEO.

• Once you've done the above and improved your site, go to Google and search for "self publishing intitle:resources", and contact each site that has a section relevant to your offering, its time consuming, but you're picking up relevant links that will drive both referral traffic and help increase your rankings.

Are you on sites such as People per Hour?

Is there a broader, more commercial product you can sell on Etsy or Not on the Highstreet? Something that uses your skills but you don't need to invest in a lot of stock? A personalised printed item for which there is demand and for which customers would buy from you rather than Vistaprint?
I wall graphic for a nursery or child's bedroom perhaps? An A3 size graphic featuring the child's name and favourite animal, food, colour etc