5 Reasons Your Website Isn’t Ranking Higher in the SERPs

With the advent and popularity of search engines, SEO has become a business necessity in most industries.

In a world where most people “Google” everything that they come across, it’s crucial for a business to be visible across search engines. However, search engine success requires the right efforts in the right direction, and if your campaign isn’t creating results, you may be making some mistakes.

In this article, we are discussing some of the common SEO mistakes that may be keeping your website from ranking higher in the SERPs.

So, buckle up and find out.

1. You Don’t Know Your Audience

Whether you are working on your business’ blog or website, if you are doubtful or unaware of your target audience, your SEO efforts may not be directed in one direction.

For example, if you are an electrical contractor in Greenville, school going kids won’t be a part of your target group. So, it will make sense to publish sensible, mature and relevant content on your web channels.

Similarly, if you own a stationery brand, school-going kids will be a significant part of your target audience, so you must keep them in mind while planning your SEO strategy.

So, before you move ahead with your SEO plan, make sure you know your audience, their needs & expectations, and based on this data, choose keywords with the right intent.

2. You Aren’t Wary Of the On Page Factors

Apart from the quantity and quality of backlinks that your site has, its on-page health also determines its rankings in the search engine.

A website that has a weak on-page strength can often be difficult for users and search engines to comprehend and crawl respectively. Plus, if your website lacks the right metadata, many users may not click through your links, even if you are ranking higher on a search engine page.

For these reasons, it’s crucial to ensure that your website’s on page factors are well taken care of.

Here’s a list of the most important on-page factors that you must consider improving first:

• Optimized title tags: You can improve your website’s on-page health by adding the right keywords to your title tags.

• Optimized meta descriptions: The meta description of a page helps users find out what the page is all about.
  
  It’s a small description that is visible right below your title tag and page URL in the SERPs.
  
  With an actionable meta description, you can encourage more people to click through your webpage link, making them visit your website.

• Optimized Images: The images from your website can also help boost your overall organic traffic, provided that you have optimized them.
  
  Image optimization includes minimizing the image size before uploading, maintaining good quality and attaching appropriate alt-text with the image.
  
  This information will send out details to the search engines enabling them to decide whether an image should be ranked higher or lower in search results.
• Page Speed Optimization: Ignoring page speed can be one of your biggest SEO blunders for the following reasons:
  
  – Over 50% of web users leave a webpage that takes longer than three seconds to load.
  
  – Search engines prioritize quick-loading pages for rankings over those that load slowly.
  
  So, if you have been ignoring page speed till now, go and take a Google PSI or GTMetrix page speed test. This will help you find out and resolve persisting speed issues on your website.

If you are doubtful about your SEO knowledge & experience but don’t want to compromise results, consult an SEO Greenville SC agency. This will help you get started bringing initial results at a quick pace.

3. Getting Heavily Inspired From Others

Many times we may come across brilliant content copies and blogs and get too inspired that their impact sticks around our thoughts.

As a result, the content & ideas that we create may also be highly influenced by them. And that can pull down the growth of your SEO campaigns and may also be labeled as plagiarized content.

For this reason, it’s best to learn from others and even take pointers, but to brainstorm for content ideas before you publish any copy.

And this holds for all types of content that you may produce, whether videos, infographics, or blog posts.

4. Prioritizing Link Quantity over Quality

We all know that backlinks are important for SEO. However, whenever quantity of links is prioritized over quality, the results are disappointing.

In fact, building poor quality links can cause almost irreversible damage to your website’s SEO. Which is why, we recommend building authoritative links.

The journey of a qualified link generally starts with a blogger outreach campaign.

The idea is simple. You need backlinks for your website and you know websites and blogs that publish content in or around your niche, so you approach them. If the deal strikes well, you will get a chance to create a piece of content for the host’s blog and may get the opportunity to add a relevant link to one of your target pages.

This will boost your website’s SEO and can push your site towards the top of the SERPs.

If you are new to the concept of blogger outreach and guest posting, get in touch with a qualified online marketing agency. They’ll take care of your entire SEO campaign.

5. Ignoring Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is one of the strongest and tallest pillars of SEO.

When you look at a well-performing competitor, you get to learn a lot about how SEO works in your niche.

From website design to writing style, from keywords to backlink resources, and from popular content formats to consumer behaviour, everything can be known better when you know your competitors.

So, make a list of your direct and indirect competitors. Check out their websites & blogs and track these channels for popular keywords and backlinks resources that can be of good use for your business.

Reverse engineering your competitors’ growth can help you grow your business.

Wrapping up

Boosting your website’s rankings in the search engines is one sure-shot way of boosting organic traffic. However, it’s a deep process that needs to be implemented carefully. In this post, we discussed five common mistakes that hamper SEO results.

Hopefully, you found this helpful.