Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has evolved a lot of the over the last 5 years, as Google tries to stop manipulation of its search engine results pages (SERPs). This can cause frustration when despite your best efforts your site sticks on page 2, whilst your competitors are languishing on page 1.
Here we highlight the top reasons why websites fail at SEO.
Table of Contents
You Are Impatient
SEO takes a while to start kicking in. No longer can you throw in some keywords and throw a few hundred links at it using your most important keyword and see instant results. In fact, depending on how competitive the niche is you could be looking at 4-6 months before you start seeing results. Notice here I said start seeing results, not no.1 spot.
Your Site Is Under A Penalty
If you notice your site has been losing traffic gradually over a couple of years or if your web site rankings just plummeted suddenly, you may be under an algorithmic penalty. Site’s that were built pre-2012, may have inadvertently been involved in practices that Google no longer will tolerate. The main two of these are called “Panda” and “Penguin”. Panda is all about the content on your website. Do you have duplicate content issues? Do you have pages that have no user benefits but are solely set up for search engines? Are you using keywords too much in your text? Penguin is all about the external links from other websites back to yours. No longer is it acceptable to just build hundreds of links from other websites, in fact this can harm your rankings. Instead, you need to look at how relevant the site is to your niche and how authoritative the link is.
You Aren’t Keeping Your Site Fresh
Keeping your site fresh is a critical to SEO Success. Static website won’t rank, unless you happen to be in a niche where no one else updates their content. Google is looking for the most authoritative, experts in the field when someone does a search, especially with Google’s artificial intelligence factor RANKbrain. You need to show Google and your visitors that you are trustworthy. You do this by keeping your content fresh in the terms of either a blog post or news feed and using social media to engage with an audience, hungry for the answers to their problems.
You Haven’t Optimise Your Site
Build it and they will come, does not work in real life or in SEO. Being found for your company name or Brand is great but unless people know you exist they won’t find you. You need to find out what keywords your potential visitors are searching for and then implement these into strategic places on your website. Neil From web design company ESP Projects said “Don’t just expect that your web designer will have done SEO, unless you are specifically paying for the service.”
You Are Blocking Search Engines From Your Site
SEO’s see this time and time again, especially new sites. Whilst a site is in development it is quite common for webmasters to put the site in development mode, to stop search engines from crawling and indexing their site whilst they get it ready to be made live. Unfortunately, when the site is finally made live for visitors to see, they forget to remove the block from Google’s crawlers. This comes from two ways: via the robots.txt file or the meta tag “no index, no follow”.
