Often with SEO you may do everything right to try and get your website ranking as high as possible, but end up struggling to reach Google’s top pages, and this can be frustrating.
If you are reading this and realise that you are in the same boat, there are a few reasons why your content might not be ranking despite your best efforts. Below, we cover the main reasons why your content isn’t ranking, and what you can do to improve your chances.
1. Technical issues
Technical SEO is often the core foundation of your website’s SEO. These technical issues encompass many different aspects. For example:
- The loading speed of your website
- Image alt tags
- Mobile usability, friendliness, and responsiveness
- XML sitemap
In today’s world, SEO professionals are often too focused on content and back-links. However, despite how good your content may be, if your website has major technical issues, it will probably not rank higher on the Search Engine Results Pages (or ‘SERPs’ for short).
On the off-chance your website does manage to reach the top pages of Google without technical optimisation, these higher ranked positions would be short-lived when Google realises that your website isn’t as technically optimised as it could be.
Your content is to sparse
How useful your content actually is for your readers heavily dictates whether or not it will manage to rank towards the top of SERPs.
Google’s algorithm evaluates and analyses a website’s content based on several different factors. It is a complicated process — one that you should not focus too much on. Instead, you should try to focus on the one thing that is in your control, i.e., producing high-quality, relevant, and in-depth content.
You will find it difficult to rank especially in a tough industry if your content is short — anything less than 300 words will not fall into favour with Google. While longer, more extensive content (500+ words) doesn’t always shout quality, Google does tend to rank longer content higher in the SERPs.
3. Your website’s back-link profile isn’t strong enough
Back-links are an important aspect of the overall search engine optimisation process. Every website has a “link profile” that search engines evaluate to determine how popular and trustworthy a site and its content are on the internet.
If your back-link profile isn’t strong enough, you will have a hard time ranking higher in the search engine results pages.
You can strengthen your back-link profile by acquiring more back-links. Here are a few important points you should remember about it:
- The back-links that you generate should mostly come from authoritative websites.
- Those web pages must be relevant to your site, niche, and industry.
- Your back-link profile should look natural.
- Quality matters over quantity when it comes to back-links.
4. You’re not using Meta Data properly
Many writers, even SEO agencies often neglect or overlook the importance of Meta Data. Some even argue that Meta information isn’t important anymore. Although many other factors have become more crucial in recent times, accurate and keyword-rich Meta information still has its place.
Meta Data includes Meta titles and Meta description. Essentially this is the ‘page title’ and ‘page description’ that you see when browsing search engine results pages, but the word “Meta” is the fancy / official term used to refer to this.
This information helps search engine crawlers understand what your content is about. Interesting and attention-grabbing meta information also encourages more clicks in the SERPs, increasing the organic click-through rate (or ‘CTR’ for short).
Make sure that for each web page you are creating unique, keyword-rich, and interesting meta information that accurately describes the contents of that web page.
5. Your content does not match user intent
It is crucial to understand that user intent plays a massive role — even more so than specific keywords and keyword phrases. Make sure that you are writing for the readers — not for search engines.
Create in-depth, useful content that solves a particular problem that the audience may be facing, and you will have a higher chance to rank on the first spot, and carefully plan your meta data (page title and description) so that it is completely focused on the content contained within the page, and write your meta data so it appeals to humans, rather than search engines!
Our conclusion
With just a few adjustments to your Search Engine Optimisation strategy, you can help increase your ranked positions and in turn generate a better flow of traffic through your website and this should lead to better conversion.
Remember that any SEO strategy takes time, so whilst you might implement the above, Search Engine Optimisation is a marathon, not a sprint, so to speak.
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