It can take some patience and hard work before you start seeing a new site inch its way up to the top 10 in the natural (aka organic) search results on Google and others. Unfortunately there is no instant way to get your site #1.

Here are some of the factors that can cause a newly launched website to perform poorly in the rankings:

1) The age of the site and domain. Google and other engines like "established" sites over new ones and will often make sites go through an arbitrary waiting period before they start ranking well (often this can be 4 months or more depending on your area and the competing sites). If you domain is newly registered (as opposed to having bought it a number of years ago), this will be negatively impacting your ranking in the short term. Unfortunately the only thing that can change this is time. It's important to understand that while you are in this waiting period, you can still see positive changes in your ranking, it's often just harder work.

2) Lack of relevant keywords in content. In order to do well for a search phrase, those words need to appear consistently (but in a natural way) throughout the site in the body text, headings, etc. If they appear too often (in an artificial way) you'll be seen as "spamming" and will be penalized for it. Since you have editing ability of the site, you are free to experiment with this. If you'd like further help, Brightleaf can provide optimization services for a fee.

3) Lack of incoming links. These are links on other sites that point to yours. Google and other engines look favorably on sites that receive incoming links from other relevant sites. So it's good to find ways to get some local sites to link to your. This could be charities you support, chamber of commerce, etc. The more incoming links (of quality and relevance) the better! Note that links from sites that are set up specifically for boosting site rankings (also known as "link farms") do not help and can actually hurt your ranking. You need links from real sites that real people visit.

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