If you’ve been trying to get better SEO results from your website, but not seeing the traffic increase that you would like, then this article is for you. SEO is a vast topic, with many strategies and opinions about what works and what doesn’t. It can be very frustrating when it seems to take forever to see results. Your SEO efforts can seem like they are destined for failure before you get anywhere near your goal, but evlos digital will explore possible reasons why your SEO efforts are not working.
Whether you’ve been working on your business’s SEO strategy yourself or you’ve hired an SEO company, it can be stressful when your SEO strategy isn’t converting. Questions like ‘how do I know what I’m doing wrong’ or ‘how long should it take to generate organic traffic’ are bound to come up. A successful SEO campaign involves knowing how search engines work and how to create pieces of content that they will acknowledge and rank on their SERPs. Failure to properly understand how they work will always result in failed search engine optimization efforts.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is a method of optimizing websites with related keywords and key phrases to help them rank highly in the search results of Google, Bing, and other search engines. SEO makes it easier for people who are searching online to find your website or blog. It helps to increase your traffic which can translate into more targeted customers/visitors for your business. SEO also builds credibility as your rankings improve so potential customers know they can trust you as an authority in your industry.
How Google Ranks Websites
Google, the world’s largest search engine, uses a complicated algorithm for ranking how it will display websites to searchers. There are many factors that go into how a website becomes ranked on Google and how high its page rank gets from 0-10. Since Google is constantly changing how it ranks websites, there really isn’t a sure-fire way to make your site appear as number one on Google’s rankings 100% of the time, but using a consistent SEO strategy will help to improve your ranking.
Crawlers are programs that run through various pages on the web; they do this by following links from one page to another. The most common crawler is Googlebot, also known as Google Web Crawler, which spiders through pages on the internet looking for new information. The content within these pages will either be indexed by the crawlers or not. Indexed websites are those that are displayed on Google searches, while unindexed sites are more difficult to find through search engines because the spider has not followed any links to reach them.
Since there are so many different crawler programs on the internet, how does Google’s spiders know how to rank your site? Well, it uses an algorithm (a defined set of steps used for solving a problem) called PageRank.
PageRank is how Google decides how to rank websites in order of how relevant the content is on a specific webpage. This means that it takes into account how many other quality pages are linked to your site, how important or well-linked these other sites are, and how frequently the search engine crawler will visit your page for new information. If your website is not being ranked by PageRank, it will not show in Google’s search engine results pages.
Why Is Your SEO Not Working?
Now that you know what SEO is and what goes into ranking a web page, let’s explore why your website’s SEO strategy might not be working.
- No SEO Strategy – How do you know if your SEO strategy is working? Do you even have a strategy? Before you even begin your campaign, you need to create a strategy that includes your goals and objectives, your target keywords or keyphrases, your content formats, and more. Get help from evlos digital to create and execute the best SEO strategy for your business.
- Poor Quality Content – Quality content is how search engines determine how important a page is within a certain topic area, how much visitors will enjoy it, and how frequently they will visit. For example, if your website only has one page on bread making from an informative perspective, you might be able to get away with having some keywords on there for people that are interested in baking their own bread, but why wouldn’t you have more information about the actual process of making homemade bread if that’s your specialty? Ensure the content on your site is well-written, provides useful information, and is properly optimized. Otherwise, Google will penalize your site and not rank it in search engines.
- Poor Keyword Selection – Keyword research is about discovering precisely which keyword phrases would be most relevant to your business and web page. When you choose the right keywords for your website, you make it more likely that users will find your content when they use the required keywords in search engines such as Google. There are many different keyword research tools on the market such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Moz to help you choose the right keywords for your SEO strategy. Ensure you get this right if you want your strategy to work.
- Poor Keyword Optimization – Using meta tags and meta descriptions are some of the ways to optimize your website with your keywords after you’ve found them. Ensure that your content has the relevant tags to show the importance of your content such as H1 tags, H2, and H3 tags. Do you know that you should also optimize your images and videos with your keywords? Save your images and videos as the name of your desired keywords to improve your SEO.
- Low Core Web Vitals Ranking – Google Core Web Vitals outlines principles that will help create a great user experience and promote engagement; something we now know leads to higher rankings. Core Web Vitals consists of three key factors: content loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Ensure these are performing at their best if you want to help your SEO efforts.
- Keyword Stuffing – Gone are the days when website owners thought that stuffing a website with keywords was the only important SEO factor. It is one of the most detrimental things you can do to your website as search engines will not rank your site if their algorithm detects keyword stuffing. Avoid this at all costs.
- Duplicate Content – Having the same meta titles, meta descriptions, and duplicate content on your website are grounds for being flagged by Google. Ensure the content on your website is original and high-quality if you want to contribute to a good SEO strategy.
- Improve internal links and backlinking – SEO is a process that encourages building links internally and externally to build trust. Having other websites linking to your content and having your content linking to other pages shows that you have great value to provide to your website visitors and will significantly improve your ranking factors. Increase and improve your link-building strategy as a part of your SEO efforts.
- Outdated Sitemaps – When was the last time you submitted your website’s sitemap to Google? Use Google Search Console to submit your updated sitemaps and improve your chances of ranking high in Google. This tells Google all the pages on your website and how they are connected to each other. It ensures that Google is aware of all your newly-published content.
Improve Your SEO Strategy with evlos digital
It is important to make sure that you are doing all that you can to improve your SEO strategy and improve your SEO campaign over time. If you don’t have the required skills and experience, use the SEO experts at evlos digital to improve your SEO campaign. Good search engine optimization requires more than choosing the right search queries, it takes a dedicated and skilled team to get it right. Give us a call at (512) 774-4864 to get started.