Why is My SEO Not Working – See the Reasons Why and How to Fix It
“My website isn’t ranking. Can you help?” We get this question all the time. So you’ve created one heck of a website, packed with engaging content and keywords in what you’ve been told are all the right places. Yet, for some reason, your website is nowhere to be found on Google. You’re not getting the clicks you want and the clicks you are getting don’t relate close to keywords you’re targeting.
SEO is harder than it seems. It’s not just about publishing quality content and a fast, mobile responsive website. Plenty of other variables come into play – a lot you can control but others which cannot. You’re working against competition as well. If you think you deserve a higher ranking than what Google is providing you, let’s look at reasons why your SEO isn’t working and how to fix them.
You aren’t link building
The more high quality websites you have linking to your site, the more authority and legitimacy you’re giving yourself in the eyes of Google. Sometimes in SEO we don’t target links or comparatively, we target low quality links. These don’t work. Enact a link building strategy that focuses on high quality links. Once you’re supporting your website with good quality links, this demonstrates to search engine crawlers that you’re worthy a high rank.
You chose keywords without researching them
It may seem obvious what keywords you want for your website but choosing keywords takes research. You’ve got to look at where a keyword is ranking, its competition, and judge its relevancy to you and your other keywords. By analyzing keyword performance via apps like Majestic, Moz, or Ahrefs, you can find out a lot about what’s most likely to generate a return. Opportunities aren’t created in SEO – they’re found. To find them, you’ve got to plug into data, research, and using these types of programs.
You’re publishing too much content
Let’s be clear – it’s not the quantity of content that is of concern, it’s the quality. When websites publish a lot of content more or less all at once, most of the time, the quality of content is low. Unless you’re sure what you’re publishing is high quality and unique, be careful on how much content’s being published. It makes more of an impact when you publish less content that prioritizes quality, rather than publishing an overabundance of content where none of it is valuable or unique.
You’re not optimizing the design of your content
A certain type of content marketing tends to rank very well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If the writing quality is outstanding on your content, this isn’t necessarily enough to get a promising ranking. On-page optimization in design has got to be prioritized as well.
Any inbound links embedded in the content should be quality ones.
The length of content should be 1,000-2,000 words, instead of 500 words or less.
Subheadings under H1, H2, and H3 subheading tags can be used to further emphasize keywords.
You’re using an outdated SEO approach
SEO is not a concrete, static strategy. Search engine optimization changes every time a search engine like Google changes their algorithm. This makes it so that SEO strategies which worked in 2005 may not necessarily produce the same results in 2020. Even year to year, things are in seemingly constant change. This is why many websites prefer connecting with an SEO expert, digital marketing team, or experienced SEO professional. In that, they have a stakeholder monitoring the latest algorithm changes and speak in the SEO community, ensuring your site is established, coded, and written in a way to maximize its potential for success.
Your web design structure and coding isn’t optimized
There’s a lot of technical effort that goes into creating results-driven SEO digital marketing campaigns. Even if what you’re doing on the page is spectacular, if the technical code isn’t managed, your effort could be in vain. Here are some basic technical keys to a quality SEO campaign.
Titles that are written with high-value keywords in concise, natural language.
Create an XML sitemap so that Google can easily find and index web pages, as well as to avoid duplicate content issues.
Meta descriptions are fully written with keywords embedded and no longer than 160 characters.
Alt-tags with keywords are used at every opportunity, no longer than six words.
URLs should be keyword-rich and no longer than 100 characters long.
You’re knowingly or unknowingly using black hat SEO practices
Black hat SEO strategies are dated and going to get your site penalized. Black hat SEO are comprised of techniques that some marketers use to cheat the system. Though once very prominent, these days, black hat SEO is always eventually found and when it is, it’s the website that pays the price. Black hat SEO strategies include maintaining private blog networks, paying for links, spamming links, stuffing in keywords, or using hidden text. This is considered wrong and unethical. Don’t pursue this method.
Competition on your target keywords is very high
When competition is high on keywords, the more work you’ll have to put to rank. A new brand shouldn’t be targeting high-competition keywords because you haven’t yet built a website equipped with the authority to take the challenge on. You’ll only be constantly defeated by popular websites with more age and authority to them. The solution evidently is to target SEO keywords with less competition, short-tail and long-tail both. This will help get you ranked on keywords and from there, you can continue building your equity as a website.
Your content is a let-down in quality and misusing keywords
Content that’s poorly written, being stuffed with keywords, and which isn’t relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for is the worst thing you can do for your SEO. A ranking website should have high quality content that’s written well and free from grammar mistakes. The discussed topics should always be relevant to the brand’s long-term goals as well as the target keywords. Over-stuffing keywords is also bad practice that could result in big penalties on a website’s SEO. If you’re unsure about why you’re not ranking well on Google, consider your content’s quality simply may not be there to justify a higher ranking than what it’s already received.
You have multiple pages of content that are similar
You may unknowingly product near-duplicate content with multiple pages written with similar content. This often happens when we are designing location-based landing pages or with keyword-specific pages. Duplicate content is a big mark against your SEO on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Every page has got to be unique and original.
You don’t know what your SEO objectives are
When we think SEO is not working, we may think this because we don’t have enough sales, revenues, conversions, email sign-ups, etc. The purpose of SEO marketing is to get the click-through. Once a customer’s clicked, the impetus then is on the website to convert. Choosing objectives for your SEO campaign, be aware of the limitations of search engine optimization. Brands and websites will find more can be accomplished when there’s investment in digital marketing as a multi-channel strategy with SEO being one channel of several, as opposed to counting on SEO exclusively.
You’ve got technical errors you didn’t even know about
When you connect with SEO experts and they conduct an SEO audit on your website, they complete an analysis to find if there are technical issues present. A lot of common technical problems that are found in these audits include improper redirects, slower than average page load times, mobile errors, and unintentional blocked pages. If they haven’t coded the site themselves, a lot of site owners may not even be aware these issues exist. Thankfully, they’re an easy fix.
