Online presence has become “a must” for every established or startup business. In this digital world, people are more active over the internet rather than in reality. So if you want to gain serious attention from the people you need to have a strong online presence. Which is only possible by having a great internet connection. Rahul Digital prices are extremely reasonable and provide more than you’re actually paying for.
There are a few things that we need to understand before we go towards the core reasons why your site isn’t ranking well. These basic SEO things can solve many problems of yours and will improve your understanding of SEO.
Online Presence and Search Engine Optimization:
Online presence and search engine optimization are directly proportional to each other. Making a website and putting your information online doesn’t complete the task but requires more effort and attention than that.
There are millions and millions of websites but not everyone ranks on the first page of the google right? Which websites rank on the first page or are the very first search result of your query? What about these sites make google rank them high above all the other websites of that category? Want to know what? Their search engine optimization strategy is what makes them rank higher.
If I simply explain it SEO makes your online presence prominent and gain you the return on investment (ROI) you require.
Why Do SEO need content so much?
Content is the “backbone” of the SEO. SEO and content marketing techniques are different domains but go hand in hand. They are the different sides of the same coin. SEO people need to understand the fact they are inseparable and the performance of one directly affects the performance of other.
Previously gaining traffic towards your site was simpler than nowadays. Today due to the strict policy and efficient algorithmic implementations by search engines have made it tough. Due to the great competition gaining traffic has become a great challenge. Most of us have heard that Google prefers the high-quality content and judge a site for its credibility. But high-quality content is not just it, you also require a strong SEO strategy to use the content in an efficient manner to bring value out of it.
Where SEO and Content marketing differ from each other?
As mentioned above SEO and content marketing are different from each other. How are they different? SEO is a little narrow whereas content marketing is a broad term.
Content marketing is basically attracting the customers with words and providing them valuable information about the product or something they are keen to know about. Whereas on the other hand SEO involves all the tactics that can be used to improve the ranking of the website. The increasing domain authority of the site shows the credibility of that particular site. DA (Domain authority) shows how much you can rely on the information provided by the site and how does it respond to the traffic coming in.
Where do the SEO and Content marketing overlap?
I call the content backbone of the Search engine optimization process. The smart algorithms produced by the search engines judge the content over its quality and how does it value the clients. Where content marketing and SEO are different there are some areas where they totally overlap each other.
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- New pages can be ranked with content and SEO: SEO is just about getting the highest ranking on the search indexes, which isn’t obviously possible without producing high-quality content. If you have a new page for your website, you’ve created new opportunities to better the ranking of your site overall. But the content shouldn’t lack in the quality. Because “Better content drives better rankings.”
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- Optimization of Keywords through content: Using important or most search words into your content gain the attention of the search engine’s crawling bots.
- Quality content provides better domain authority: Did you ever check the domain authority of Forbes or Mashable? Or any other great content publishing site? Ever wondered where did they get this great DA? It’s because they publish the quality content which adds value to the reader’s information and brings them back asking for more.
The fact should be understood right away that we need to have a right balance of SEO and content marketing to gain good ranking in search indexing.
If you think you’re doing everything right and still your site isn’t ranking well. Then there are several reasons that could have happened. And you may not know about it. Below are the reasons that are maybe causing hindrance into your rankings:
1. Strong and active competitors:
Let’s face the fact that some industries are little more overcrowded than the other. And the major giants of the particular industry certainly have better investments assigned to their marketing campaigns. Strong and active competitors can be a major reason why you aren’t ranking well.
The remedy to this problem:
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- Identify your competitors and keep a keen eye on their online marketing strategies and also find the flaws in their strategy. Knowing your competitor strategy allows you to build a counter effective strategy.
- Targeting a smaller market means having fewer competitors to deal with, which brings more opportunities for you. And gives you chance to attain better geographical rankings.
2. Google hasn’t indexed your website:
If your site isn’t showing up on Google then that is mainly because you haven’t been listed by Google yet.
Check if you’ve been indexed or not?
The question you must have in mind is that how do you get to know of your site is indexed on google or not? Then there is the answer to it:
You can find out by using the prefix “site: yoursite.com” in google search bar.
Google will show you all the web pages you’re hoping to see if it doesn’t show them then it means you haven’t been indexed by the search engine.
Get your site indexed on google:
Well, Google will eventually find your website but it can take a few weeks to work out. The best thing you can do in the meanwhile is adding your site to the Google Search Console and providing them with your sitemap.
This would inform the google about the pages you want to be shown in search and would speed up the process a bit.
3. Your site isn’t mobile friendly at all:
In this connected world, we constantly are connected with everything at every hour. Every major or minor site is making their sites mobile-friendly so that user doesn’t experience any sort of difficulty.
Mobile friendly sites mean that if a user accesses them from their phone or iPad it takes the shape according to the device used.
Many great sites couldn’t get the rankings just because they weren’t mobile friendly.
4. Meta tags are not optimized:
Basically, search engines use Metadata to figure out what your site is about. Each web page of your site has its own set of Meta tags which are to be optimized through the content present on that page.
How to improve the title tags?
Title tags are extremely important and directly impacts the search engine rankings. Well following are a few tips to improve the title tags:
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- Include a high ranked keyword
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- Keep the length of about 55 characters so that the search engines don’t cut it down
- Use a sentence structure that prompts the audience and seems catchy rather than simply describing the product or service. In short use “call to action” phrase.
How to improve the Meta Description?
The meta description should be concise and meaningful. It should convey the message in very limited and simple words so that the user or client understand what are you actually offering. Make it catchier.
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- Ask a question to entice the audience. Or ask a question which gets the audience all curious to know the answer.
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- Keep the length under 155 characters.
- Include a call to action phrase or email address or phone number so that audience can easily get in touch.
5. Containing No high-quality backlinks:
Backlinks are exactly what they sound like. Links that direct the traffic back to your site is called backlinks.
The quality of the backlinks also has a great impact on the website ranking and domain authority. It indirectly shows how reliable and credible is your site. Search engines take this thing very seriously into account while listing the search results.
We all are familiar with this phrase of “Quality over quantity”. Quality backlinks are far more important than the number of backlinks. Backlink from a valuable website can benefit you more than 100 low-quality backlinks.
How to gain backlinks?
The most effective method to gain backlinks is the “guest posting” and “article submissions”. Get your high-quality content published on high DA sites to gain yourself healthy backlinks. This may require a little hassle but are extremely effective and can greatly help the credibility of your site.
6. Social media abandonment:
Maybe you’re doing everything right to optimize your site but you’ve completely neglected the social media platforms or are doing the minimum for them. It can also lead to damage to the ranking of the site. A site not only needs attention towards it but also towards all the pages linking to it whether it’s social media or some other page.
Staying active on social media sites are highly important.
Here are a few social media tips to work on:
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- Provide high-quality content like videos, photographs etc. constantly to keep the audience updated and informed.
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- Constantly share the new and old content related to your brand on social media accounts.
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- Do give the link to your social media pages on your official site.
- Do add fun or informative tweets into the content to increase the overall engagement of the audience.
7. Bad website builder:
I totally understand the appeal of an easy website builder which provides the drag and drop functions to design a site. Which surely offers a cheap way to design a website of your own. But those websites rarely rank higher on the search results.
Why doesn’t a DIY site rank higher?
Why is a DIY site rarely seen ranking higher in the search engines? Because in order to provide ease to create a site, the tools create a whole lot of excessive code which slows down the performance of the website.
Reasons why your DIY site may not be ranking well:
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- You’re putting limited effort on the basic SEO.
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- The overall speed of the site is not very good and is not entertaining the needs of the coming traffic.
- You’ve got fewer SEO plugins compared to the other platforms.
What can you do to make your DIY site rank better?
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- Firstly check the speed of the page. If it takes longer than 5 seconds to load the data than you need to fix the problem right away. Because who’ve got time to wait? Right?
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- Devise a proper SEO strategy to optimize your site. And compare it with your competitor’s strategy to find the shortcomings of your strategy.
- See if your site is user-friendly or not.
8. Formal Penalty by Search Engine:
There’s a huge difference between “having your site penalized” and “being hit with a penalty by search engine”. Up until we have only discussed why do search engine devalue your site. But sometimes the search engine also issue a penalty against your website.
Being penalized by the search engine is a rare occasion but if it happens it requires serious attention. There are several reasons to be penalized by search engine but following two are the most important:
- Over on-page optimization:
Blackhat SEO leads to the over on page optimization which causes the search engine to penalize you. We all know “excess of everything is dangerous”. Same is the case with SEO. If you stuff the keyword into every URL, title tag, Meta tags etc. the crawling robots of the search engine may raise a red flag which can cause a great damage to the website’s DA.
- Unnatural Link-building:
SEO- If we could define it some other way it would be like: “Gaining your site quality backlinks which could lead to increase its overall credibility into the search engine world.”
Buying yourself the links, swapping links or attaching your site to the poor quality links and use of unusual anchor texts can get a site penalized very easily.