Are your SEO efforts hitting rock bottom? This suggests that it may be a good idea to review your strategies and see if there are any changes that need to be made.
2017 is expected to be big for SEO. There are several important trends that will continue to have an impact over the next 12 months, such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), RankBrain, mobile-first indexing, and the latest developments in Google’s algorithms. Many old SEO strategies and techniques will become obsolete, and those whose SEO strategies are not currently up-to-date will be at a disadvantage.
Seven possible reasons why your performance might be waning are listed, as well as how you can change what you’re doing to get back on track.
Most Common Reasons SEO Campaigns Fail (And What to Do About Them)
1. Your Website is Outdated
There are a few main reasons why your website may be ranking poorly. These are:
Website Architecture
Users are more likely to leave a website if they have to click more than three times to get to the page they’re interested in. The other main reason why people leave websites is because they have difficulty navigating between pages, or because the drop-down menus have too many links.
Some best practices you should aim for when working on your website structure are:
- Main pages should be available from a header on the homepage
- Site structure should follow a logical and predictable order
- Use breadcrumbs to help with navigation
- Optimize HTML and CSS code to improve crawlability
If you want your site to be linked by Google, you need to improve your site’s structure. This will also help you improve your ranking in search results.
Website Speed
Site speed is an important ranking factor. By improving the loading time of your site, you may see an improvement in ranking. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a great way to measure speed. You can improve your domain by running a test on it.
Common things that can be improved are:
- Upgrade your server or invest in better hosting
- Use external hosting (e.g. Dropbox or AWS) for large files
- Resize and compress images
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver images
- Minimize redirects
- Clean up your code
Responsiveness (Mobile-First Indexing)
Mobile devices are increasingly being used to search and browse the internet, surpassing desktop computers. Given that your site’s responsiveness and speed are key, it’s important to pay attention to those elements.
This is shown by a few recent moves by Google: the creation of the AMP project in 2015 and, more recently, the announcement on mobile-first indexing. To stay on top of these trends, your website should conform to the speed requirements in the previous section as well as:
- Use responsive design or be a dynamic serving website
- Work with AMP principles
- Be built as a Progressive Web App (PWA)
- Be visually pleasing and feature easy navigation and links
HTTPS
If you want an extra boost in ranking, move your website from HTTP to HTTPS to offer greater security. By switching to HTTPS, you can also switch to HTTP/2 which may soon become a requirement.
2. You Haven’t Nailed On-Page SEO
There are some common on-page SEO elements that you may need to update, which could be holding your website back. Here are the most important ones:
URL
A bad URL structure is confusing for both users and search engines. Make sure that your URLs are:
- Clear, simple, short, and descriptive (avoid numbers)
- Follow a logical order that mimics your website structure — make URLs guessable
- Include main keywords (but not excessively)
- Separate different words in URLs with hyphens, instead of underscores, but do not overuse hyphens either
Meta Tags
It is important to add good and relevant meta tags to your page so that it will appear properly in search engine results pages. The two most important aspects of your meta tags are your title tag and your meta description. To improve your meta tags:
- Include the primary and secondary keyword in the title tag + brand name
- Don’t go above 60 characters in your title tag
- Use unique title tags for every page
- Aim for relevance, avoid keyword stuffing
- Make the H1 heading different from the title tag
Link Structure
Good on-page SEO involves having a well-structured link system and taking care of any broken links. The better your ranking will be if you have more internal links that are deep and relevant. Here are some things to keep in mind for your internal links:
- Link between pages and posts on your site including to “deep” content
- Use relevant links
- Make anchor text comprehensive, natural, and relevant (do not over-optimize)
- Use follow links
- Do not link excessively
If you have a lot of pages on your website, you should pay attention to broken links. If there are broken links on your page, it can hurt how high your page is ranked, make people not want to stay on your site, and raise the percentage of people who leave your site after only looking at one page.
Schema.org and RankBrain
rankBrain is now the third most important ranking factor for websites This suggests that pages which are easy for algorithms to understand are more likely to rank higher. If you want your website to be able to keep up with RankBrain’s growing demands, you should think about implementing a schema markup.
Schema markups are code that you put on your website to help search engines understand your site’s data. The schema can be thought of as a map that tells search engines what kind of information is contained in each element on your page. Search engines are able to better identify relevant content on a website when they understand the meaning of the website’s content. This content is then more useful and helpful to users when they perform a search query.
3. You’re Not Building Links Properly
In addition to linking to other pages on your site, it is also important to build links from other sites to yours. Backlinks are seen as the second most important ranking factor by many people, with content being first.
If you want your inbound link strategy to be successful, you need to make sure the links are of good quality and come from authority domains.
Consider the following when working on your link building strategy:
- Vary anchor text when publishing guest posts
- Do not participate in link networks
- Disavow any low-quality links pointing to your site
- Focus on generating content on your website that is valuable and can be used as a resource by others so that they will want to link back to it
- Discover your competitors’ backlinks and learn about their techniques and sources
- Build relationships, ask for links, and suggest that mentions are turned into links
If you want to offer more value to your users and make them appreciate your content more, you should also include outbound links on your website. They can also help to form relationships with other high-value websites.
4. Stuffing Keywords
Keyword stuffing can destroy your SEO efforts.
When you optimize your website, you may be tempted to use shortcuts to speed up the ranking process. The methods you are using to improve your search engine ranking will not be effective in 2022. It will hurt your overall SEO efforts.
Keyword stuffing is an unethical method of filling a web page or content with multiple keywords in order to achieve high rankings on search engines. Some businesses are still using this method for short-term gain, which is unfortunately not sustainable.
These are some of the common types of keyword stuffing:
- Repeating the same keywords or phrases multiple time
- Adding keywords that are not related to the context of the content
- Using keywords that are not relevant to the topic of the content
Your website’s success depends on providing helpful, informative, and engaging content to your visitors. Answer the questions that your potential customer has in their mind. Your goal should be to create content that is enjoyable to read and provides value to your readers, not to stuff your website full of keywords in an attempt to rank higher on search engines.
Make the keywords appear naturally within your content. Read about BERT and NLP. Add your keywords to your page title, meta description, headings, and keep the keywords you use throughout your page to a density of 1-1.5%. This will ensure that your page is properly optimized for search engines.
When creating 2000 words of content, you should use your keyword no more than 15 times.
5. You’re Ignoring Long-Tail Keywords
You’re missing out on 70% of organic search traffic if you’re not using long-tail keywords in your SEO campaigns. Since it’s difficult to rank for generic short-tail keywords, it’s a better idea to focus on long-tail keywords.
Do you know why you should target long-tail keywords?
- You can easily outrank your competition
- 90% of people use long-tail keywords to search
- Long-tail keywords enable the context of your content
- You will have better conversion using long-tail keywords
- Content that is focused on long-tail keywords provides more value to readers
Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Autosuggest are all great tools for finding long-tail keywords. If you are just beginning, we recommend using Google Autosuggest.
You should keep an eye on the related searches at the bottom of search result pages. Always remember that questions can be long-tail keywords too.
Look for questions that people are asking on Quora or niche-based forums to get an idea of what people are looking for answers to. Target these keywords in developing your content.
6. Building Low-Quality Backlinks
Search engines like Google look at a variety of factors to determine whether a site is more credible and authoritative than its competitors. These factors go beyond mere on-page SEO considerations.
By looking at your backlinks. If you have links from high authority websites, search engines will view your site as a high authority site in your field. Just think about the voting system. When credible individuals vote for you, your credibility increases.
If you have low-quality links coming from low-authority sites, and sites that are linking out to too many other websites, you can be sure that search engines will not have a high opinion of your website.
Websites that are only focused on building links are called link farms, and these links are low quality and bad. The Google Penguin update in 2012 impacted the way businesses build backlinks. Even though some individuals continue to use spammy link-building strategies.
It’s better to have no links than to have lots of low-quality, spammy links.
There are a few ways that you can determine if your website has low-quality links. Some methods are free, while others require payment. The free method involves Google Search Console. To see a list of domains linking to your web pages, simply click on the “Links” tab.
Links from directories and social media networks usually help improve your SEO. There is always the potential to find links that could damage your SEO efforts.
There are also tools available like Monitor Backlinks, Ahrefs, and SEMRush (paid tools) that allow you to check your entire backlink profile and identify any low-quality links.
But, how do you identify low-quality backlinks? Ask the following questions and you’ll easily find backlinks that are harming your website:
- What kind of website is linking to my site? Check whether the site linking to your site is relevant to your niche and check the quality of outbound links. If they have hundreds of outbound links to other websites, it may be a bad website to be associated with.
- Does the link provide value to my business? If your answer is Yes, then you should keep it. If you don’t want your website mentioned on that site, it’s better to get it removed.
- Are there pages like About Us, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy on the website? If a website is spammy, there won’t be any important pages that often exist in a legit website.
If you find links to your site that are not relevant, it is best to remove them. This will help keep your site’s authority and credibility.
Google Search Console’s Disavow tool can be used to remove any links that you want to be ignored by Google. If you are not able to remove the unwanted links yourself, then you should contact the website owner and request that they remove the links for you.
7. Your Website Is Not Responsive on Mobile Devices
A trend in website design is responsive design, meaning that the website responds to the device it is being viewed on. This means that whether a user is on a phone, tablet, or computer, the website will adjust to fit the screen. Since Google has started to prioritize mobile-responsiveness as a ranking factor and rolled out the mobile-first index, it is now essential for businesses to have a responsive website.
Although Google has not confirmed that responsive design is a ranking factor, they have said that they prefer sites that offer a good user experience (UX) for visitors. This means Google indirectly prefers responsive websites.
If your website is not responsive, it is not effective for users on smartphones and tablets. You will lose visitors if your website is not responsive. Currently, in February 2021, mobile devices account for 57.23% of Internet usage. This statistic shows that a large number of people are using their mobile phones or other mobile devices to go online and browse websites.
If your site does not automatically adjust to fit the device it is being viewed on, you should fix it as soon as possible. Make sure you hire the right website developers to work on your site. Choose developers who have the skills and experience necessary to create the site you want. Ignoring the importance of responsive web design can negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Conclusion
SEO is evolving to keep up with changes in search behavior, new developments in search algorithms and AI, and the sharp increase in the amount of content being produced.
Social media is becoming more and more integrated with other marketing approaches to provide a better experience to users. This year, SEO trends will be more closely aligned with how users behave online.
It is important to revisit your digital strategy and see what is working and what is not working in order to be successful. To win at SEO, you need to keep working on it regularly, instead of letting it catch dust and having to catch up hurriedly the next time Google updates their algorithm.
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