12 Real reasons why SEO is failing for you
When you hire an SEO consultant or an agency to do SEO marketing for your website, you always set an expectation for them to deliver. But what if your chosen SEO company are not meeting the standards and are unable to deliver your expectations. It means something is wrong somewhere. Today, we will be looking at a few reasons why SEO is failing for your website.
There are stages when you observe that your website rankings are plummeting instead of gaining momentum towards the first page.
There are a few reasons to consider as follows.
- Choosing a company
- Outdated strategies
- Website tuning
- Abandoned analytics
- Choice of keywords
- Appropriate link building
- Content
- Over optimisation
- Ignoring customers
- Impatient
- Hacked site
- Technical SEO
1. Choosing a company
Whenever you ought to choose an SEO company, make sure you choose the right ones. There is a multitude of companies in your city but which one to choose is based on your budget and business skills.
One thing is for sure that you should not always go for the ones that are cheap. Remember, you get what you paid for. It is also true in the SEO business too. No business is different considering this context.
You only get what you pay for. If you are paying around $600 per month, then do not expect drastic results. SEO is complex and it requires time and effort to understand the niche and your competition.
Based on a few factors, SEO companies are able to tweak your website to shoot up the rankings however it also depends on the resources that they use for your website. Resources cost money and a lot of it. A subscription to several SEO tools are not less than $1000 a month so if you are paying much less than the resources required, then you would obviously have slow progress.
We just talked about the price point, but there are other factors involved too when choosing an SEO company such as their previous results or case studies, which can prove quite helpful when deciding your marketing partner to grow your business.
One important factor is ‘SEO guarantee’. Believe me or not, there are no such things as ‘guarantee’ in the SEO world. Yes, we are all used to this word but there are certain scenarios where this word doesn’t suit and SEO is one such world.
If any company guarantees you the top spot rankings then they are misleading you to get your money. It may be hard to believe this statement but it is 100% true.
We can provide optimisation to get your website in top 10 but there are companies who guarantee top spot rankings or top three rankings or top five rankings which is nothing but a hoax. Even Google cannot guarantee your rankings then how could any other company!
The rankings can remain stable or on top provided the optimisation has been done correctly. But for that to see, you will have to hire the correct company that can provide efficient optimisation for your website to stay for a longer duration on top ranking results.
2. Outdated strategies
There are more than 200 factors that are involved to rank any given website. Google and other search engines are evolving with time and they are making it better and better day by day. With search engines getting smarter and smarter, they tend to improve, which makes some of the strategies to drop out of the rankings factors.
One such example is using the meta keywords – Google stopped using meta keywords as a ranking factor which implies that meta keywords should not be used for ranking a given web page. However, if some agencies are using it then it is obviously considered as a ‘keyword stuffing’ which negatives affect your website’s ranking in Google.
If outdated strategies are being used, then your website will have little to no effect in ranking improvements. Rather, at times, may have an adverse effect.
Some more examples of outdated SEO strategies are:
- Using exact match domains – Exact match domains are no longer gaining an advantage over non-EMDs – more on it here.
- Link directories – Getting a link from link directories is a no-no. More on it here.
- Building interlinked sites
- Paid links
- Keyword variation pages
- Keyword stuffing
- Automated link building
3. Website tuning
This is a very important step in search engine optimisation. It is all in here that can make or break your website to rank higher up in search results and it is the reason why it is involving and complex.
One of the main aspects of tuning a website is its architecture. It means how the pages are aligned and linked to each other.
The pages that share the same context should be interlinked in an ‘appropriate fashion’. We also call this technique a ‘Silo architecture’. This will enable Google and other search engines to understand the flow of your website, better.
It helps to gain an advantage over others who are not using this technique.
One more aspect is the broken links – if your webpage does not exist and if you keep linking to it then Google will be forced to think that you are not optimising your website the way it should be and it may penalize you for it.
There are many more aspects of tuning a website, which is also covered in the last step.
4. Abandoned analytics
Analytics is like a brain where all the data are collected and should be analysed before taking further action to improve SEO. There are parameters and data that should be read correctly in conjunction with the data from ‘Search Console’ from Google.
The analytics provides us with data such as a number of visitors, where did they come from, what browser do they use, what device do they use, what query did they use to come to your website, did they come through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIN, or search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo, or any referral sites, or through your Pay-per-click Google Ads campaigns!
These data are very important for research and implementing new strategies.
Upon implementation of a new SEO strategy, this is where you get to also know if your strategy is working or not. Analytics provides the numbers proof which is required to learn the correct path of any SEO strategy.
Ensure there is analytics installed and that your website is also registered with Google’s Search Console.
5. Choice of keywords
Well, this is also highly important.
Most of the time the end-user or website owner have no idea of what kind of keywords are to be used for ranking. So 99% of the time, SEO companies decide on the keywords.
It is wise to use the following strategy if you starting a fresh. Start from the long-tail keywords (there are 4 or more words in the key-phrase) and then move towards the medium-tail keywords (3 words) and then move to short or generic keywords (1 or 2 word phrases). Remember here that long tail keywords have minimum competition with low search volume and generic keywords have high competition with larger search volume.
The key with this strategy is that you are going to get more volume of traffic. If your website ranks for 100 keywords with 10 search volume at the top 3 positions then you could be getting around 400 – 700 visitors a month. Comparatively you are only after 5 keywords with accumulative search volume of 4000 and are ranking at 3 to 5 position, then you will get the traffic of around 1600 visitors (38% to 45% of the search volume) which may or may not be targeted.
An example:
If you are a new car dealer company and let’s say you are targeting the keyword ‘car dealer’ and if you rank high enough to get the traffic which is good but what if there are also users who are intending not to buy a brand new car but used ones. In that case too, users might be searching for car dealers but they won’t click on your result if they aren’t intending to buy a brand new car but will look for those who are selling the used cars. Hence it could be either way in terms of generic keywords.
On the other hand, if your keyword is a ‘new car dealer’ and you are ranking high enough, you will get targeted customers.
Few more examples of right and wrong keywords. When you go through it, ensure you understand the search intent of keywords and company situation.
| Sr. | Company situation | Wrong keyword | Right keyword |
| 1 | New car dealers | cars for sale | new car dealers |
| 2 | Landscaping company | home landscaping | professional landscaping company |
| home landscaping designs | professional landscaper ‘cityname’ |
In short you will satisfy what we technically call – ‘searcher intent’.
Hence, always choose keywords that would satisfy their search intent.
6. Appropriate link building
It is a vital factor in SEO.
Normally, people buy links to get higher rankings but that won’t suffice and do not help most of the time. Normally, link building is a technique which needs to be learned. There are parameters that needs to be understood and checked before buying any link to your webpage.
Ideally, we always create the content that is link-worthy so you normally get people linking to you. Yes, we are aware that without reaching out, this is not going to happen. So we reach out to those who could be interested in linking to the articles that add value to their readers.
So the takeaway here is to write a link-worthy content that other would love to link back to your webpage. It is not always necessary to link to the page that you wanna rank. There are ways that with appropriate linking structure, the webpage that we are planning to rank despite being not linked directly.
7. Content
This is the most important factor and a part of on-page SEO.
On-page SEO meaning whatever we do on the website and off-page meaning something that we do not perform on the website such as link building.
80% of your SEO is on-page and 20% off-page and hence content is a major factor.
If there is no content, Google will not be able to match your website with similar or like-ones and may not appropriately justify to rank. Well, there are a few cases where content is not required to rank but such cases are rare.
If your website is having thin content or low content than the competition, your website may not rank better. There are cases as follows which should be avoided.
- Less content with more codes
- Over optimisation of keywords in the content
- Adding or repeating the same keywords more than once or twice without relevancy
- Adding keywords that makes no sense of the sentence
- More keywords on the page than absorbable content
- Content or webpage is blocked from getting indexed
- Absence of meta title
- Absence of meta description
- Duplicate content
- and many more on case to case basis…
Content doesn’t mean only text. It includes text, images, audios, videos, and infographics.
All of them needs to be optimised depending upon the niche.
Don’t get someone to write the content who have no idea of your niche or else it will end up nowhere and you will have to start all over again. There are various ways to get content written appropriately. Let SEO guys get in touch with you and understand your business and process better for them to write it perfectly that suits your business situation.
8. Over optimisation
Yes, there is a thing like over optimisation.
It is easy for SEO guys to get so much involved that sometime even unknowingly they over optimise your website which could lead to drastic results.
Hence from time to time it is vital for website owner to keep checking their website of any anomalies.
The over optimisation could occur in a number of ways from writing over-lengthy content to extra lengthy headings, from adding numerous images to making information architecture confusing. All these mistakes are now becoming common.
Ensure that none of them is taken too far off to loose rankings.
9. Ignoring customers
I heard you.
You might think that how could I ignore potential customers through a website? Right!
Yes, it is possible and it is mostly done through your meta title and meta description.
They both are responsible for users to click on your website link in search engines. If they aren’t appropriate or misleading, then your potential customers won’t visit your website and you could lose a potential sale.
Always write the meta title and meta description for individual pages that actually represent it and make it quite enticing for users to click.
It just doesn’t end up here.
If your users end up on your website but your webpage do not say anything that was mentioned in the meta title or meta description, then they will hit the back button which technically will increase the bounce rate and will bring down your website CTR making it to lose its ranking position with time.
10. Being impatient
SEO is a gradual process.
It requires a lot of time and effort to understand the scenario. The scenario includes the niche, competition, a comparison of their webpages against yours.
Sometimes it may take 3 months to even a year depending on what keywords you are agreeing upon and the situation of your website. The situation meaning if SEO has been done on it previously, if so, how was it done and where does that site stand in terms of ranking for the chosen keywords. Any penalty imposed by Google and if so, which ones and a strategy needs to be devised to come out of it.
Choosing a keyword has already been covered in point 5 above.
If you wish to be impatient, then SEO is a no go for you. Just tick that off from the marketing list.
Sit with your SEO manager and explain your situation and get the time period from them. They will be able to tell you within a month or two after they have seen all the scenarios.
If you do not see improvement after their provided time period, it is time to move on and look for a better SEO company, mate.
11. Hacked site
If your site is hacked, Google will notify you in Search Console.
It is a norm that when your site is hacked, you obviously do not want your potential customers to come to it to get their computers infected. Hence, Google will stop ranking your site or potentially de-index (de-list) your website.
The only option would then be to get the malware out of your hacked site and send reconsideration request to Google. Once Google verifies that your site is not potentially dangerous, it will push it back to its previous rankings.
12. Technical SEO
Last but not the least on our list.
Technical SEO involves a number of things such as speed, type of coding, usage of appropriate sized images, choosing the faster hosting, adding robots.txt file, adding a sitemap.xml file, mobile responsiveness and many more.
These are not the major factors but it does play a good role in satisfying search engines and your potential visitors as well.
You wouldn’t want to visit a website that is loading very slow on a mobile device and you would also not want that same experience to be imparted to your website visitors. Hence technical SEO is important.
