You have done everything as a business owner; create an appealing website and pay a professional copywriter to curate enticing content to engage your target audience. In reality, you are expecting incredible results as soon as you launch your website, but your website cannot rank for its main target keywords. This article wants to reveal some reasons your website is not ranking and simple tips to overcome the challenge.
There are several reasons some cannot rank and we shall discuss them one after the other. However, it is essential to work with a team of digital marketing experts to ensure your website is properly indexed and ranked on search engine result pages.
1. Fierce Competition
As a business owner, you may have followed every procedure to have a well-designed website for your business. However, the competition to rank higher on search engine result pages is quite fierce and tough. In most cases, your website may not rank because you are using keywords with high competition. It is crucial to check the competition for your target keywords before launching your campaigns. You can make use of tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic to evaluate the competitiveness of the keywords you want to rank for.
2. Bad On-Page Optimization
You need to be sure if your website is properly optimized for organic search. You need to understand the importance of keyword density, outreach building, link building, and keyword page titles. Google note these elements as they play an integral part in the ranking of your website. Bad On-Page optimization can cause your website not to rank and these are some things you should observe to overcome this anomaly:
- Your URLs should be at least 50-100 characters long
- Your title tags must be natural, attractive, and rich in keywords.
- Your Meta descriptions must attract the attention of website visitors, and motivate them to click. They should not be longer than 160 characters and must be unique and contain relevant keywords.
- Create an XML sitemap for your website to enable Google to discover and index your web pages with ease.
- Your Alt tags must have the right keyword and must not be longer than six words. This improves the search ranking of your page.
- There are several paid and free tools to help you with your website’s on-page optimization. You can use them to discover and rectify your on-page optimization problems. Example is Yoast SEO for WordPress.
3. Short Word Count
When Google updated its Panda algorithm in 2011, several websites were affected badly. Since that update, research has shown that Google often rank pages that have over two thousand words of unique content.
If you are not generating unique content around 2,000 words, your website may not rank for competitive keywords. If you are still writing content of less than the required word count, it may be hard to rank your website.
Ensure you write valuable content for your web pages and insert the relevant keywords in your content. This would significantly enhance its visibility on search engines and make it rank higher. Another method to fix this issue is by attaching the relevant subheadings with your primary and related keywords. Make sure you write your content with your audience in mind, and apply H1, H2 and H3 subheadings to gain more traffic. When your content addresses the pain points of your audience, you will succeed.
4. Unprofessional link building practices
Have you hired the services of a SEO specialist for your website SEO in the past? Is the company reputable and proven to show results over time?
If you are in doubt, Google could penalize your website for following unethical procedures to rank for some target keywords. For instance, Google may de-index your website once they discover your website used black hat techniques to rank on search results. However, if your website used to rank for its keywords in the past but you noticed it is no longer ranking for the keywords and there is nothing wrong with the on-page optimization, you may need to check if Google has penalized your site.
Check the Google Search Console to know if your website has been penalized. These are the steps to know if Google has penalized your website. Click search traffic option on the Google Search Console, and open the tab tagged “Manual actions” to know if your website is facing a penalty.
