Three causes, almost always the same. Two of them can be fixed for free, in one afternoon, without a technician.
You type your trade and your city, and you do not see your business. It is not a mystery, and it is almost never a punishment. In nearly every case it is one of these three reasons.
Cause 1: you have no Google listing
The most common, and the easiest to fix. The Google Business Profile is the box that appears with your name, number, opening hours, map position and reviews. For a local business in Douala or Yaoundé it often brings more calls than the website itself.
It is free. You create it, fill it in, and prove you are at the address — Google usually sends a code. Then: recent photos, correct hours, and a reply to every review, including the bad ones. Especially the bad ones: how you answer is read as carefully as the review itself.
Cause 2: your site does not use the words people type
Companies write their trade the way it is taught at school. Customers type it the way they say it. “Large-format digital printing solutions” versus “banner printer Douala” is not the same world.
Do the exercise: ask five people who do not work with you what they would type to find someone like you. Write down their exact phrases. Your pages need those phrases, in the titles and in the text, written naturally.
And you need one page per subject. A single “Our services” page listing eight offerings will rank for none of them. Eight pages, one per offering, with real text: that ranks.
Cause 3: your site is too slow to be offered
Google measures how long your page takes to appear on a phone on an average connection. Beyond a few seconds it prefers to offer something else — and so do your visitors.
The usual culprits are always the same: photos straight off a camera without being resized, a theme loaded with plugins, adverts and trackers, and an overloaded shared host.
What nobody can promise you
Nobody can guarantee first place. Not us, not anyone: Google does not sell it and accepts no arrangement. Be wary of anyone who promises it — it is the most reliable sign you are being sold nothing.
Be wary too of bought reviews. They get spotted, they get removed, and when a customer notices, trust does not come back.
The order to do it in
- The Google listing. Free, one afternoon, and often the biggest effect.
- Speed. Compress your images, remove pointless plugins.
- The words. Rewrite your titles and pages with your customers’ phrases.
- One page per subject. Then an article now and then about the questions you get asked constantly.
- Patience. A young site takes weeks to be taken seriously. That is normal and cannot be forced.
If you want us to look
The review is free: we look at your site, your listing, the competitors who are visible, and we hand you a list of what is blocking you, in order of importance. You can have someone else act on it: the list is yours.
