SEO is something that can be taken for granted, which leads to a lot of frustrations from small businesses trying to grow their online visibility. There are a lot of factors that go into SEO, including on-site and off-site optimization, taking a “long-tail” approach, website speed and general site performance, technical SEO issues, and more.
If you’re doing SEO yourself and find that it isn’t working, you might be running into snags that you can’t see yourself. Here’s a list of reasons your SEO Campaign might not be working:
1. Bad Content
Simply coming up with a generic 500-word article won’t be enough to rank high in SEO. Whether you’re running a blog or a sales website, making sure your content is competitive is important. The best way to rank is to create content that educates, informs, and entertains your audience. If you don’t have this kind of content, then you can’t expect your audience to stick around for long or come back for more.
2. Lack of Content for Many Keywords
While SEO is getting quite competitive, especially with saturated keywords, it’s still possible to get ranked with a well-optimized page. However, it’s important to have some content on your site for desired keywords in your industry. Covering all the bases allows you to rank high and be more attractive to your audience.
3. Not Linking to Other Relevant Pages
Linking to other pages of your website helps your website to crawl to other pages. If you’re creating content for each keyword, you should also link that content back to your main website. This makes your site easier to crawl, but also provides a better user experience. Not every page on your website has to be linked back to your main website, but certain ones can definitely serve as anchors for it and help to boost your rankings.
4. Not Optimizing Your Metadata
Metadata includes your titles, descriptions, tags, navigation, and more. If you aren’t checking the details of your metadata and making sure they are all relevant and descriptive to your website, then you will lose out on an important ranking factor. This is one of the most overlooked areas of SEO and can actually mean the difference between getting ranked for your keywords and not.
5. Over-Optimized Content
Search engines don’t like when your text reads like a computer algorithm. If you’re using a “keyword stuffing” method to rank higher, then you’ll only get your website penalized by search engines. Also, if your content isn’t unique, or if the same content exists on different pages, you’ll get penalized. Come up with unique and interesting text and stop trying to compete with the top-ranking websites through keyword stuffing and duplicate content.
Conclusion
Success in SEO is not something that will happen overnight. It takes time, patience, and a lot of effort. With that being said, if you find that your SEO campaign isn’t working, circle back to your content.
Not having enough content might be holding you back, and not having the right kind of content might also be problematic. Take a long-tail approach to SEO and your content, try to optimize your site as best as you can, and avoid trying to cheat the system. Keep these things in mind and watch as your ranking starts to move up.
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