Today the SEO practices are changing and shifting that affects ranking – which means you have to evolve your website and content to match the pace. Hence, many people wonder how Google rankings work, but do you know what “Ranking” means?
In SEO, “Ranking” refers to the position of your content on the Google search result. In other words, it means – when people search a particular keyword related to your content, your web page must be the first result. Most people do not go past the first page of Google. Hence, it is better to rank your website or content on the top 10 of the first page, and if it is top 3 – then it is the golden opportunity to get traffic and traction to your website. However, to make your content visible, there are certain factors to be considered, and most of the content on the internet is lacking visibility because of such reasons that are usually overlooked.
As per Ahref report, 90.63% gets no traffic from the content and only 0.21% of the content gets about 1000+ monthly visits. So, to ensure you are going to the top from the unseen list, you need to know about a few factors that are harming and slowing down your SEO progress.
In this blog we have mentioned a few factors, which, if optimized properly, can take your content to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Focusing on these factors you can help your website or content climb SERP ranking and improve the overall ranking.
Keywords Are Not As Competitive
Though highly competitive keywords can be really challenging to rank – especially if you are new to the SEO game. In the initial, it is advisable to focus on long-tail keywords with lower competition. These keywords are more specific and targeted. Thus, making it easier for website to rank. Moreover, less competitive keywords are best as it helps establish authority in a particular niche – making it more viable to ranking for the highly competitive keywords.
Here’s how to identify low-competition yet still high-traffic keywords for your website –
- Conduct a proper keyword research using Google Keyword Planner, Ahref, or SEMrush.
- Analyze which keyword has not been targeted by your competitors yet.
- Use long-tail keywords that incorporate specific phrase or questions related to your niche.
- Look for the keywords with lower difficulty score, and also check for the competitor keyword ranking and target similar and targeted keywords for your website.
Here we have mentioned a brief guide on how to find less competitive keywords using Ahref tool –
- Go to Ahref.
- Type a phrase or word into the Keywords Explorer.
- Visit the report on matching terms, or the phrase that seems similar.
- Consider a maximum Keyword Difficulty (KD) results of 20. You can filter it later
- To view keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5, set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR.
Pro Tip: Select keywords based on quality, rather than quantity. Focus on keywords that has low competition and high volume – this is best if you have lower DA (Domain Authority) website.
Poor Site Structure
A poor site structure slows down SEO progress by blocking search engine crawlers from efficiently navigating and indexing your website. Relevant content on the website may not be properly prioritized or linked, when a site lacks clear organization. Thus, leading to lower visibility in search results, which result in decreased organic traffic and the ability of search engines to understand the context and relevance of your conten goes down.
Additionally, a poor site structure can confuse visitors, leading to higher bounce rates and lower user engagement metrics – and these two factors are very important in search engine rankings.
To improve your site’s SEO progress through better structure –
- Make your site mobile-friendly with a responsive design
- Organize content in a clear hierarchy with logical navigation
- Interlink relevant pages to improve crawlability and user experience
- Use descriptive headings and subheadings to make content scannable
- Optimize URLs with relevant keywords and avoid excessive subfolders
- Write content focused on user intent, naturally incorporating target keywords
- Ensure fast page loading speeds by compressing images and minimizing HTTP requests
Lack of Mobile Optimization
Google added mobile friendliness to its search algorithm in 2015 as a ranking consideration. More than 60% of all web traffic has come from mobile devices in the past year. As per Statista, compared to desktop users’ 35.47% and tablet users’ 2.12% share of traffic in January 2023, mobile users accounted for 65.41% of this traffic. A lack of mobile optimization can significantly slow SEO progress by:
- Failing to meet Google’s mobile-first indexing requirements, leading to lower rankings
- Providing a poor user experience with slow loading speeds, difficult navigation, and unreadable content on mobile devices
- Losing potential customers who abandon sites that are not mobile-friendly
- Missing out on mobile-specific search queries and local “near me” searches
To improve mobile SEO, ensure your site is responsive, fast-loading, and easy to navigate on smartphones. Optimizing images, videos, and content for mobile is crucial for providing a positive user experience and boosting search rankings.
User Experience (Rank Brain)
A poor user experience can negatively impact SEO rankings as Google’s Rank Brain algorithm prioritizes user satisfaction. If a website fails to provide a positive user experience, it may be penalized, leading to lower rankings and reduced visibility.
Here’s how to improve user experience –
- Satisfy search intent by providing relevant content
- Ensure mobile responsiveness for a seamless experience
- Optimize page load speed to reduce bounce rates
- Eliminate intrusive interstitials and pop-ups
- Secure your website with an SSL certificate
- Maintain a flat website hierarchy for easy navigation
- Improve Core Web Vitals for a better user experience.
Technical SEO Issues
The elements affecting your website’s search engine ranking are referred to as technical SEO. Broken links, duplicate content, and improper redirection are common technological issues. These problems have the potential to harm your SEO strategy and hinder your efforts. 66.3% of the pages have no backlinks.
Conduct routine technical audits on your website to identify and address problems right away. To improve performance, use tools such as Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and others to find and fix technical problems.
Here’s a checklist for technical SEO –
- Improve server response time
- Optimize & reduce image size without affecting visual appearance
- Minimize render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
- Limit number of resources & HTTP requests
- Set a browser cache policy
- Reduce number of redirects & eliminate redirect loops
- Ensure website is mobile-friendly
- Build search engine-friendly URLs
- Use HTTPS secure protocol
- Set preferred version
- Correctly set up 301 redirects after site migration
- Ensure resources are crawlable
- Test robots.txt file
- Verify indexed content
- Review sitemap to avoid being outdated
- Review blocked resources with Fetch as Google
- Optimize crawl budget
- Avoid meta refresh for site movement
- Use hreflang for language and regional URLs
- Ensure tracking is working properly
- Redirect/replace broken links & resources
- Audit internal links for higher ranking chances
- Remove duplicate content
- Use structured data to highlight content
- Maintain a reasonable number of on-page links
- Avoid canonicalizing blog pages to the root of the blog
- Get rid of duplicate content by reviewing HTML improvements in Search Console
- Apply canonical tags to pages with duplicate content
- Use rel=canonical tag to avoid content duplication
- Implement breadcrumbs for better navigation and user experience
Thin or Duplicate Content
Well, search engines like Google pay handsomely for high-quality, original content. Search engines may overlook your website if it contains pages with sparse, uninformative information or if the same content appears again. This damages your credibility and perplexes your audience as well.
When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), content is king. Your content won’t connect with readers and won’t do well in search results if it isn’t interesting, well-written, or of value to the audience.
Creating interesting, top-notch content that appeals to the interests and requirements of your audience should be your main objective. Invest the time and energy necessary to produce captivating blogs, articles, and multimedia that provide your readers with genuine value.
Here’s how you can ensure content quality –
- Create content that provides value and answers user queries
- Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant topics and phrases
- Organize content in a clear, logical structure with headings and subheadings
- Write engaging, easy-to-read copy that is scannable and accessible
- Optimize content with target keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing
- Ensure content is original, accurate, and up-to-date
- Incorporate relevant images, videos, and multimedia to enhance the user experience
- Encourage user engagement through interactive elements like polls, quizzes, or comments
- Regularly review and update content to maintain relevance and freshness
- Promote content through social media, email marketing, and other channels
- Monitor content performance using analytics to identify top-performing content and areas for improvement
Local SEO not Optimized Properly
Not only is SEO international, but it’s also local, and neglecting it would be equivalent to disregarding your neighborhood’s devoted clientele.
Assume you are a Boston-based baker. You don’t want people in Los Angeles searching for “best bakeries near me” on Google to find your website, do you? Here’s where local SEO’s magic comes into play. It is a highly targeted type of SEO that helps local businesses engage with their target market by focusing on particular geographic locations. If local SEO is not optimized, it can significantly slow SEO progress by –
- Failing to appear in local search results and the Google 3-pack for relevant queries, missing out on potential customers searching for nearby businesses
- Providing inconsistent or inaccurate business information across online directories and listings, confusing users and search engines
- Lacking localized content with relevant keywords, making it difficult for search engines to understand the business’ relevance to local searchers
- Neglecting to manage online reviews and reputation, which are important factors in local search rankings and user trust.
Here are some pointers for local SEO performance optimisation:
- When performing keyword optimisation, incorporate location-specific phrases into page names, meta descriptions, and content.Invite clients to write reviews of your GBP and get back to them right away.
- To include your company information consistently online, use local directories and citations.
- Include a Google Map of the location of your company on your website.
- Ensure that your NAP data is accurate on all directories and platforms.
A pro tip for improving local SEO: To improve local SEO progress, businesses should optimize their Google Business Profile, manage online listings, create localized content, and monitor and respond to reviews.
Insufficient Backlinks
You should be diligent and pay attention to backlinks. A healthy backlink profile is a powerful indicator of the domain authority and credibility of your website.
Backlinks helps in improving website ranking on search engines by indicating the credibility and relevance of a website to search engines. They are essential for showing that a site is trustworthy and valuable to others, ultimately helping improve rankings.
By placing links in relevant and authoritative web pages, enhancing visibility, and focusing on acquiring meaningful dofollow backlinks from reputable sources, websites can effectively boost search engine visibility and rankings. It is essential to get quality backlinks from high domain authority sites, as they significantly impact a site’s ranking. Hence, always opt quality over quantity as link from low DA,DR are not of much use.
Here’s few effective link building strategies to enhance your SEO progress –
Create High-Quality, Valuable Content
Producing engaging, informative and link-worthy content is crucial for attracting natural backlinks from other websites. Focus on creating content that provides value to your target audience and addresses their pain points.
Broken Link Building
Identify broken links on relevant, high-authority websites in your niche. Reach out to the site owners, inform them of the broken link, and suggest your own relevant, working content as a replacement. This strategy allows you to acquire backlinks while providing value to the linking site.
Niche-Relevant Directories and Citations
Submit your website to relevant industry directories, niche-specific websites, and local citations. While these links may not directly impact rankings, they can improve your site’s visibility and lead to more referral traffic and natural backlinks.
Guest Posting on Relevant Blogs
Reach out to blogs and websites in your industry to contribute guest posts. This allows you to tap into new audiences, build relationships with influencers, and acquire high-quality backlinks from relevant sources.
Influencer Outreach and Partnerships
Identify key influencers, bloggers, and industry leaders in your niche. Engage with their content, build relationships, and explore opportunities for partnerships, such as co-created content or influencer endorsements, which can lead to valuable backlinks.
Monitor and Audit Your Backlink Profile
Use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or Moz to regularly monitor your backlink profile. Identify low-quality or spammy links that could harm your SEO and consider disavowing them through Google’s Disavow Tool. This helps maintain a healthy, high-quality link profile.
Pro Tip: Avoid shortcuts and link schemes as they could result in penalties. For long-lasting effects, instead spend money on high-quality link-building SEO services.
Not Focusing on Meta Tags
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a webpage’s content but do not appear on the page itself. They provide information to search engines about a page’s title, description, and other key elements. They help search engines understand the content of a webpage, improve click-through rates, and enhance visibility in search results, in addition to determining the page’s relevance and ranking in search engine results pages.
As per a study by Ahref in 2017, 7.4% of top-ranking pages don’t have a title tage – which hurts the SEO progress of your website. Low-quality meta tags can slow SEO progress by providing inaccurate or irrelevant information to search engines, leading to decreased visibility and click-through rates. Poorly optimized meta tags can result in lower rankings, reduced organic traffic, and missed opportunities for attracting potential visitors to a website. It is essential to ensure meta tags are relevant, descriptive, and optimized for keywords to maximize their effectiveness in improving SEO performance.
Here’s how you can optimize your meta tags for a better SEO progress –
- Keep the meta tags under 60 characters.
- Use relevant keywords in meta tags, but avoid keyword stuffing.
- Use at least three meta tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content.
- Ensure your meta tags are free of spelling and grammatical errors.
- Keep meta descriptions concise, compelling, and relevant to the page’s content.
- Optimize image alt text with relevant keywords to improve image search visibility.
- Use structured data markup to provide additional context about your page’s content.
- Regularly review and update meta tags to reflect changes in your website’s content and SEO strategy.
- Monitor the performance of your meta tags using tools like Google Search Console and adjust as needed.
Google Manual Actions
The worst dread of any website owner is Google’s manual activities. These arise from not adhering to Google’s Webmaster standards and can considerably impede your attempts towards search performance optimisation.
When a manual action is issued against a site, some or all of its pages may be omitted from Google’s search results, leading to a drastic decline in organic traffic and visibility. Manual actions are issued by Google’s human reviewers when they determine that a site violates their webmaster quality guidelines, such as having unnatural links, thin content, or engaging in spammy practices. Recovering from a manual action requires fixing the identified issues, submitting a reconsideration request, and waiting for Google’s review, which can take several days or weeks.
The following advice will assist you in avoiding manual actions:
- Understand Google’s webmaster rules.
- Keep an eye out for crawl issues and correct them right away.
- Keep an eye on your backlink profile and revoke any irrelevant or spammy connections.
- Be aware of black hat SEO techniques that might result in penalties, such as keyword stuffing and hidden text.
Insufficient Social Signals
Likes, shares, comments, and other interactions on your posts on social media are considered social signals. Strong social involvement has an indirect effect on the SEO of your website, even if there is no direct correlation between social signals and search rankings.
Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments on social media platforms, can indirectly impact SEO progress by increasing visibility, driving traffic, and building brand reputation. While there is no direct correlation between social signals and search rankings, strong social engagement can lead to more backlinks and mentions from other websites, which are crucial ranking factors.
Additionally, social media platforms are considered reputable sources by search engines, and links from these platforms are seen as high-quality backlinks. However, social signals alone are not enough to significantly improve rankings; they should be part of a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes creating high-quality, shareable content and leveraging other ranking factors.
Here’s how you can amp up your social SEO game with better social interactions –
- Optimize your social profiles with relevant keywords and a consistent brand image.
- Share high-quality, engaging content that encourages likes, shares, and comments.
- Use hashtags strategically to increase visibility and reach a wider audience.
- Encourage user engagement through contests, polls, and interactive posts.
- Collaborate with influencers and industry partners to expand your reach.
- Monitor and analyze social media metrics to track performance and adjust strategies accordingly.
- Share your website content on social platforms to drive traffic and improve search engine visibility.
- Make use of social media advertising to target specific audiences and boost engagement and visibility.
Poor Online Reputation
When evaluating a website’s legitimacy and dependability, search engines take its reputation into account. This affects your rankings since search engines want to deliver the most reliable and relevant results to users. Poor online reputation can significantly harm SEO progress by impacting a website’s credibility, visibility, and search engine rankings. Negative reviews, unfavorable brand mentions, and lack of proactive reputation management can lead to decreased trust, reduced traffic, and lower search engine rankings, ultimately hindering overall online success.
A website that receives a lot of negative reviews or comments may turn off potential customers, which will lower traffic and conversion rates.
Here’s how you can improve your online reputation –
- Monitor customer reviews and respond promptly to both positive and negative feedback.
- Make social media presence a priority to engage with the audience and build a positive brand image.
- Create valuable content relevant to the brand to enhance visibility and reputation
- Monitor SEO rankings and optimize website content accordingly to improve online visibility.
- Conduct periodic audits and review online reputation strategies to identify areas for improvement and adapt strategies effectively.
Failing to Track SEO Progress
You can’t tell the progress until you measure it – and this is true for digital marketers and social media managers.
Failing to track SEO progress can significantly slow down SEO efforts by leaving marketers in the dark about the effectiveness of their strategies. Without tracking, it’s impossible to measure the success of SEO efforts, leading to wasted resources on ineffective tactics and missed opportunities to leverage successful ones.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush provide valuable insights into website traffic and performance, enabling data-driven decisions to fine-tune SEO strategies. Regularly tracking metrics such as organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, and time on site helps identify areas for improvement and adjust strategies accordingly.
How Often You Must Do SEO Audit?
An integral component of any SEO analysis is an SEO audit. They at the very least assist in maintaining the vitality and health of your clients’ websites. They will be losing out on valuable organic traffic that can provide results if their websites aren’t regularly optimised for SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Every content is not an island. Virtual endorsements, connections, and an article framework are required for content. Similar to building a house, SEO need solid foundations in order to have any hope of ranking extremely well. It’s similar to spring cleaning to perform an SEO audit as part of a thorough website assessment procedure for every client. Although it’s not necessary to do it every day, if you don’t, you’ll start to notice items piling up in unexpected areas.
Your requirement to perform an SEO audit on a regular basis will depend on several aspects, including:
- The size of the website for your client: larger websites usually need more frequent audits.
- The industry standards in that particular niche: your client has to maintain their SEO health if the competitors do.
- The present condition of their SEO health: a website that scores lower on SEO health will typically require more audits until it reaches a minimum threshold.
SEO problems must be resolved far more swiftly if your client depends significantly on online revenue. For instance, if your customer is a tiny, local firm, you might find that conducting a thorough SEO audit every six months is sufficient, depending on the size of their website. Weekly audits are typically necessary for larger eCommerce sites with more moving components and a consistent content marketing plan in order to identify and fix problems as soon as they arise.
Technical site audits can be laborious to do. However, they are essential to ensuring that your client’s SEO plan isn’t ruined by minute, often invisible technological flaws. If there is a major update to the website or the ranking algorithm, or if you notice a sharp decline in organic website traffic, you should also think about doing an audit.