Why Not Every Website Ranks Well In Google Immediately

Most people think that SEO is easy.

That ranking for searches like “driving school in [your town]” is easy.

That getting more traffic onto your site is easy.

But the truth of the matter is that SEO for driving schools is a difficult process. Our team has years of experience running effective search engine marketing campaigns, but the fact remains that there are many steps to take before you’re ranking well.

You Need a New Website

What’s the point of increasing traffic on your website if the people who visit it are going to choose a driving school with a better web presence? Teenagers have high expectations and short attention spans. Because most driving schools target teens, your website needs to give a great first impression or you’ll lose students to your competitors.

Here’s the new website of one of our clients, Right Lane Driver Training. Their new website allows them to convert website visitors into paying customers!

You Need On-Site Optimization

Once your website is ready for visitors, it’s time to make changes to your on-page SEO. That includes making changes to page titles, h1 headers, image alt tags, URLs and your internal linking strategy.

You Need to Submit an XML Sitemap

Without getting too technical, a website’s sitemap is a list of all the pages, posts and media on the site. You must create a customized sitemap for your entire website and then submit it to Google through the Google Search Console.

After you submit this sitemap, you have to wait for Google to index all the pages on your site! While we optimize all our clients’ sitemaps for Google, it’s still The Big G that has the final say in adding your pages to search results.

Up to this point, your pages haven’t begun to rank yet. Once your sitemap is submitted and your pages are accepted by Google, then getting Google to rank your pages well begins.

Gaining Authority For Your Website

Google ranks websites on how authoritative they are. You can gain online authority for your website in a few different ways:

• Writing great content that adds value in your industry.
• Having content that’s shared via social media.
• Being well recognized online for great reviews, endorsements, awards, press mentions, etc.
• Having a specialization in one primary, niche area before expanding into others.
• High-quality links back to your site from other authoritative sites.

Unfortunately, if your website is new or hasn’t been properly optimized before, you’re starting at ground zero. This means it will take time to outrank the competition who may have been running SEO campaigns for a while now.

The SEO campaigns we run take care of all the on-page optimization that’s required to rank well as well as winning links to our clients’ sites when necessary. But the above items are a few things you can prioritize to give yourself a boost when it comes to your website’s authority and ability to rank well over time.

Good SEO Takes Fine Tuning

One of the main reasons why ranking takes time is because Google’s ranking algorithm’s change all the time. Here at DSM, we monitor changes in Google’s algorithm regularly and make changes to our clients’ campaigns constantly. Regardless, this still means that moving up in the rankings doesn’t happen overnight.

Search Engine Optimization is a long-term solution to win more traffic and business for your driving school. The first few months are always difficult, but once your website has excellent on-page optimization and begins to gain some authority, you’ll start to see yourself move up in the rankings.

The trick is to be patient and let a trusted partner handle your website’s SEO. It’s important to keep in mind that you want to be running a healthy business in 2 years, not just two months.

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Josh Meah

Josh is the CEO of DrivingSchool.Marketing. His goal is to be the marketing and business development partner of driving schools around the world, helping them become thriving businesses while also expanding general awareness for the importance of traffic safety standards and education.

Latest posts by Josh Meah (see all)

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• How To Protect Your Driving School From An Instructor Who Leaves To Compete With You - April 10, 2018