If your website is struggling to gain page views, your search engine ranking could be to blame. Regardless of if you have a great product to sell or excellent content for people to read, nobody is going to visit your website if they cannot find it. And if you have a low search engine ranking, most people are going to be unable to find your site on Google, or any other search engine for that matter.

Even if you have a strong social network presence, you are less likely to get more views than if you have a high search engine ranking on Google. While only 18 percent of consumers start researching products on social media like Facebook or Twitter, more than half (58 percent, to be exact) start by using a search engine. And only 24 percent of consumers start by going directly to a company website.

Paying for sponsored results on your favorite search engine’s results page is not necessarily going to increase your web traffic either. As you might be able to guess if you think about your own search habits, most people ignore the sponsored results that they see. In fact, between 70 and 80 percent of people disregard them completely and opt for the organic results instead.

Given the large amount of consumers that head to search engines to find what they are looking for, search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for your website. There are plenty of internet marketing companies out there that can help to improve your search engine ranking, and make sure people are able to find your website. SEO marketing can help your website get a larger piece of the over 100 billion online searches that are conducted around the globe each month. Outsourcing your SEO to an internet marketing company may be a good idea given the complexity of search engine algorithms such as Google’s “PageRank,” which, you may not know, was named after Google’s cofounder Larry Page. Let the online marketing specialists handle the SEO while you concentrate on having a great product or content.

Blogging is a terrific way to increase your search engine ranking as well. If your company has a blog, then you are likely to have 434 percent more indexed pages on search engines than if you did not blog. The more indexed pages you have, the greater amount of leads you will get.

If you have been baffled as to why your latest business venture is receiving no internet traffic, be baffled no more, as it is probably due to a poor search engine ranking. So find yourself a good, reputable internet marketing company to help drive more traffic to your site by increasing your search engine ranking. Or, if you are feeling especially entrepreneurial, do your own SEO. Either way, get that page ranking up, or forever live in obscurity.