I'm starting to look at my underperforming website's SEO, particularly the online reputation, and found my Google 'My Business' listing doesn't show as even existing when searching for my online presence. I had someone show me a Silktide report yesterday that said it was missing, and today found a search tool from 'Moz' that says the same. It certainly exists, and it's got some good reviews on it that would help my ranking too.

Any ideas?

Also, my website is showing as not being updated in 100 days or so, but I have been uploading blogs, to a wordpress part of my site under a folder /blog. So I'm worried, is Google not crawling in the Wordpress part of my site at all?? Any reason it would hit a wall here?

Edited June 25, 20197 yr by BenB

1. Has your Google my business listing been verified?

2. Are the address and other details on the Google business listing EXACTLY the same as those on the website?

3. Is the website linked to your Google business listing?

4. Google may well consider the main website and the blog to be two separate sites.

5. Google may not be indexing the blog because there is nothing to index. All the galleries are dynamic - which means all google may see is an empty page.

And it's not helped by a woeful page speed score. 24/100 on the blog and 33/100 on the main site. Google puts great store on page load speed. And there is almost zero useful indexable content.

If you want google to site up and take notice you need to make the blog the main site (with additional pages) and get words on the blog posts. Lots of words. and stop repeating the business name in the titles. Google really doesn't like this.

And this is the title on your homepage "Wedding Photography, Lavenham Photographic". Google is just going to lump you in with every other wedding photographer site in the UK.

That being said, a search for "wedding photography lavenham" has your detail in the side bar with your 17 google reviews. so it's not all bad.

Thanks Fisicx for your very detailed answer. I've never really cared about how the website performed as so much work I get has come straight from recommendations, it's only now, after years of bad practice that I've decided to have a big push at correcting all the terrible SEO elements of my site!

I thought I had Verified the Google listing, but it seems not, so I've started the process again and am waiting for the postcard to arrive in the post.

I will get working on creating any non-wordpress pages in Wordpress, so the whole site will live in the Wordpress side, then I guess just leave it in the /blog/ folder and then forward everything there. Or do you think there's a benefit to going to the effort of moving the whole Wordpress site to the root folder? Worried about breaking it!!

I'll get working on filling the blogs with content, and I'll remove the repeated company name in the titles. 

When you say, with my page title I'll be lumped in with every other wedding photographer site in the UK, what do you suggest is the important change? Adding my region? That's the one part of your answer I'm afraid I didn't get! Thanks

Yes, focus on the region. Make sure google knows where you are.

On the blog posts, bin the small images. Just show the images full size. Better for your visitors and it means you can get rid of another plugin.

As to the site location, build everything and then just move the Wordpress bit to the domain root. Your host should be able to do this for you in a nanosecond.

Thanks Fisicx, I'll get cracking (There's rather a lot to do!!...)

Perhaps I've made another error - because adding alt text to thousands of images was impractical, I have, for quite some time, named all the images with the wedding venue name and my company name. And people have said they find my images on google images. So I've thought it was working. But perhaps that's keyword cramming too? Unless there's a plugin for bulk naming alt tags with venue name or something useful rather than nothing at all on thousands of images

Not alt text, it’s captions you need. Google wants to see the words on the page. Maybe not every image, but enough to describe a group of images.

Good idea, I'll caption an image every once in a while, the thought of sitting down to alt-tag every one of thousands of images was enough to put me off starting!