A question that’s always asked is whether a business should invest in SEO, PPC, or both. It’s the age-old SEO vs. PPC debate.

In an ideal world, a business should balance multiple marketing channels to avoid a reliance on any single source of traffic (and conversions). But, especially for smaller businesses, budget is often a challenge, and resources must be allocated efficiently. Funds aren’t endless.

Even in this instance, it’s essential to balance a long-term SEO strategy with a small but targeted PPC campaign.

While often used interchangeably, on-page SEO and technical SEO are not the same.

Ultimately, on-page SEO covers your page’s content, meta tags, images, and the like. Think of these as the page elements that are visible to users.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, is all about how Google crawls and indexes your site. Think things like site speed, structured data, canonicalization, XML sitemaps, hreflang, and more. 

If your website isn’t ranking on Google, there are a few reasons why that could be. But first, head to Google and run a site: search for your website.

If you see your site’s web pages listed, you know that your site is indexed. Reasons why your website isn’t ranking could be that:

• Your site is new and hasn’t built up sufficient authority to rank for competitive search queries. You can’t launch a website and expect to rank for your target queries overnight; you need to demonstrate that you deserve to rank.

• Your content doesn’t match the searcher’s intent or lacks in-depth analysis or quality compared to the pages that rank for the queries you’re looking at. You need to ensure that the pages you serve are at least as good as, ideally better than, what’s already ranking. 

If you don’t see any of your website’s pages listed, this means that it has not been indexed. Reasons for this could include:

• Your website is blocking search engines from crawling it (usually in your robots.txt file) or is instructing them not to index it (generally using noindex tags). Resolve these blocks, and you should see your site indexed.

• Your site has launched very recently (within a few days), and you have not submitted the site to Google or linked to it from anywhere, meaning it hasn’t yet been indexed. Set up Google Search Console and request indexing.

• Your site has received a sitewide manual penalty for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This is rare and unlikely. However, you would need to have been using some seriously black-hat SEO tactics for this to happen.

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to yours.

You see, links are one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors, with these acting as a vote of trust from one website to another.

As we mentioned in our ‘What are Backlinks?’ guide, “If five people who didn’t know each other all recommended a particular restaurant as the best in your city, you would likely trust that you would be able to get a good meal there, as multiple individuals would all be vouching for it.”

Think about links like this, and it’s easy to understand why they’re such an important ranking factor. But not all links are equal, and not all are of high quality. Some links are deemed manipulative and unnatural. Focus your efforts on earning links from websites that are topically related to yours and that are held in authority.