Your website’s SEO is not working, but why ? Why all the efforts you made to improve SERP of your website seems to backfire? Why your website failed to achieve the desired ranking despite all the time and money you invested in for the purpose. Every time you look into analytics, you find no or disappointingly small results.
Here are 7 reasons your website’s SEO is not working
I totally get your frustration. You have got a great website with original content you are proud of but still your search engine ranking are stuck. Let me help you out why your google rankings are not improving.
1. Your Website’s Content Quality
Your website’s content decides the fate of your website. Spammy and duplicate or too low content diminishes the chances of improvement for website’s search rankings. If your website’s content is not informative, precise, perspective, analytical to the visitor, it does not count as quality content. Your content wont work if it lacks at the characteristics given above. Some other examples of bad quality content are copied, spun, stuffed or thin content.
Let me break down what does I mean by “crappy content types” I stated above.
Copied/Stolen/Duplicate Content
If you have picked up your content from any other web source and pasted it as it is on your website, it is considered as copied or duplicate content. This type is not punitive but it really affects the SERP.
Thin Content
Google launched panda update to deal with website with no or very low content. So, don’t even think about internal link keyword stuffing and blank pages. Google wont like anything that hurts UX.
Spun Content
There are a lot of websites and software that spin a page’s content replacing words and phrases with synonyms. Don’t do this. Google’s crawling bot can easily track this practice.
Content with Keyword Stuffing
Google don’t like the idea you writing a keyword multiple times all along the article of page content for the sake of keyword optimization. Google would flag your page as spam and penalize it.
Auto-Generated / Automated Content
Don’t use IFTTT or another tool that posts any other website’s content on your website through a rss or atom feed.
How Do I Fix it?
“Original” and “relevant” content is the keyword you are looking for. There are no shortcuts in this age of competition and AI. Bad content is only going to hurt the reputation and ranking of your website.
2. You didn’t Choose Keywords wisely
You optimize your page or article for one or two specific keywords but choosing wrong or irrelevant keywords jeopardize your efforts and could blow any chance for getting desired search engine ranking. Know your audience before putting your content before them. You can pitch something to your visitors without researching the proper keyword and approach.
Let me paint a scenario for you here. “Web Development” and “Website Developer” are two different keywords with different scopes. If you know your niche, you own all the traffic.
How Do I Fix it?
There are a lot of keyword research tools out there. Our most recommended tool is Google Adwords Keyword planner. Ahref comes at close second. These tools would help you plan your keywords and check the competition. I would recommend you to check with multiple tools for the accuracy and broader picture.
3. Bad coding practices and broken links
As the competition is getting fierce, it has become almost next to impossible to rank your website better with just 
tweaking the content and keywords and brush aside the web development practices. There are meta tags, title tags, facebook open graph meta, twitter cards that your website might be missing right now, making your website’s ranking to take a dip in the traffic.
Meta title tells the search bot crawling your website what your webpage is about. Google delivers content on the search engine indexing based on these tags. Then there are Facebook graph meta tags and twitter card tags which have become essential these days. Your website cannot afford to leave these tags in this age of social media.
Broken links are major problem in the path of getting your website ranked higher. Try sticking to the url structure you created while posting the article or creating the page. Google really doesn’t like broken links and penalize your website if its riddled with broken links.
How Do I Fix it?
You need to fix and Optimize meta titles, descriptions and social media tags. You can use services like “seomofo” or plugin like “YOAST SEO” (for wordpress website) to optimize your webpage for specific keywords. Audit and fix broken links using services like “dead link checker”.
4. No Alt tags for Images
Images with proper alt tags and file names play a huge role in your website’s SEO. The person searching for a specific keyword can find the optimized image through the images tab or simple on the google web page listing. These images appearing in the search bar also link back to your website so it’s another plus.
This is the easiest task a search engine optimizing guy can do to rank the page higher and I have seen many of the paying no or little attention to it. Just add the proper alt tag and name the image with web safe name containing the keyword and get ready to be ranked higher for the keyword you optimized your image for.
5. Website loads slow
How many times you closed the tab and switched to a closer competitor because the website you were visiting took ages to load? Nobody likes lag. Not only a slow website hurts the user experience, this problem can affect your website’s SEO and reputation. Domain Authority would have to take a blow after higher bounce rate because users are bouncing off the website. Google takes even milliseconds to the count when it comes to ranking and domain authority on the google.
How Do I Fix it?
Thankfully, Google has introduced a tool to help you audit your website for slow performance and deal with this problem. Following are few steps one should take to reduce load time.
- Enable GZIP Compression
- Minimize HTTP Requests
- Reduce server response time
- Enable browser caching
- Minify HTML, CSS and JS
- Optimize and resize images
- Use CDN to speedup frequently fetched content
6. Lack of backlinks
What is a backlink? Backlinks are your website’s links on other websites. Google takes the amount and quality of website’s backlinks into account and evaluate website rankings accordingly. A backlink from a website in your niche and with good domain authority is better than hundreds of backlinks from irrelevant or low-quality websites. Good backlinks can boost your website’s ranking making your website rank higher among the competitors.
How Do I Fix it?
Provide authors and owners of good websites in your niche your quality content and request them to backlink to it. You can use OSE to find out your backlink statistics.
7. No or Little Social Media Activity
People and brands use social media to generate crazy amount of traffic for the website which translates into user trust and higher SEO rankings. Social media is being used to engage the targeted audience and keep getting the visits your website deserves.
Effective Social Media engagement pretty much is like quality backlinks.
How Do I Fix it?
Use tools like BuzzSumo to get your social media stats. Create social media accounts affiliated with your website and maintain them regularly to keep your website users engaged.
Conclusion
There are short guides to SEO but it is not one day or one-time process. It’s a comprehensive ongoing process. You’ll need to take all of the above actions and checklists into consideration and create a strong strategy to bring in the traffic.
Good afternoon. Many thanks 🙂 Really enjoyed reading this page.
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to write more about this issue, it may not be a taboo matter but typically people do not discuss these topics.
To the next! Many thanks!!