Many website owners and bloggers find themselves in a dilemma where they find it impossible to rank.
They do all the SEO practices but nothing seems to work.
It may look like it, but it’s not a dead end.
If you are unable rank despite your hard work, it means you have ignored something that is important to search engines.
All your efforts may go in vain until you don’t fix these important issues.
Here I will tell you all these important problems why SEO doesn’t work.
1. Targeting Wrong Audience
It is important that you know and understand your audience before you start a website.
There is a possibility that not everyone on the internet is your audience.
For example:
- If you provide your services or sell your products on a specific geographical area then you should limit your target to that area.
- Same case goes if your news or blog is interesting for a specific part of the world.
You can’t expect many people in Australia to be interested in Bollywood news.
You don’t always have to rank for a global audience.
Targeting local keywords give you better conversion rate and sales.
Here are some statistics by Think with Google conducted in 2016 to clarify the importance of targeting right audience.
76% of people who search for something local on their mobile phone visit that business on same day – 28% of them purchase the product/service.
2. Rank Only For Relevant Keywords
Many blogger try to rank for all similar keywords they can find.
That is wrong!
You should only target the keywords that have been answered in your content.
For example:
If you write an article on ‘Blogging Tricks to Get More Traffic’, you will probably rank for keywords like blogging trick, blogging tips etc.
However, it can sabotage the value of your great content if you go as far to include some keywords like ‘best free blogging platform’ for the same article.
‘best free blogging platform’ may look similar but it conveys a different sense.
A person searching this keyword won’t be looking for ‘blogging tricks to get more traffic’.
Here’s what will happen if you try to rank for irrelevant keywords.
First, it will be difficult for your article to rank top because it doesn’t answer that query.
Two things will happen if it does reach your audience.
- Increased Bounce Rate: Searcher will click, find article irrelevant and leave fast.
- Pogosticking: Searcher will ignore your page in search results.
They are both among the ranking factors of Google.
Google will know that your content is irrelevant when it’ll see your page being ignored in search results and visitors leaving early.
If Google gets the impression that your content doesn’t offer value to the user, you may not rank even for the keywords that suited you best.
3. Ignored Long Tail Keywords
Many of us tend to target keywords that have high search volume.
We believe the keywords with high search volume will bring more traffic.
Such keywords also have high competition.
Long tail keywords usually have low search volume – so they are ignored.
Long Tail keywords comprise more than three words and define a precise query.
This could be the reason why SEO does not work on your site despite all efforts.
Do you know how long tail keywords can be useful for SEO boosting?
- First, over 60% of all organic traffic is generated from long tail keywords.
- Second, it will decrease your bounce rate and pogosticking because your content will be more specific to what user wants.
Another benefit – this type of traffic gives you a better conversion rate and more leads.
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4. Practicing Black Hat SEO
Are you doing your SEO enhancements yourself or have hired someone else to do it?
If you are doing it yourself, you need to stop using these black hat practices.
Make sure no such hacks are practiced if you have hired someone to do it for you.
These tricks may get you on top for the time being but they destroy your site for good.
Cut your connections with all black hat tricks – e.g. disavowing all spammy backlinks.
Look for signals if you have already been penalized by Google.
You are going to need a lot of hard work and luck to recover from a penalty. If you have been penalized, this Neil Patel’s guide might help you recover.
5. Running after Google Algorithm
Sometimes, our SEO doesn’t work because we are spending our resources on wrong direction.
Bloggers run after impressing Google and forget the reason why we create content.
For USERS, of course.
Google wants to give the best user experience to its users by showing the best content for their query.
You need to do the same.
Provide the best user-experience.
Create content for users not Google!
Brian Dean has shared 200 possible ranking factors of Google. Over 50 of these factors are linked to user-experience and content quality.
6. Crawl Issues
Google reads your site using a bot.
This process is called crawling.
Google bots crawl your website to understand what it offers. It then ranks your website for suited keywords.
If it can’t read you, how will it rank you?
Make sure there are no crawl issues in your site.
There are two types of crawl errors.
- Site Errors: It can’t crawl your entire website
- URL Errors: It can’t crawl one or more pages of your website
You can see all crawl errors of your website on Google Search Console.
There is also a simple site hierarchy you should follow as Rand Fishkin has explained in his article on crawl priority and indexation issues.
7. Duplicate Pages
Siteliner is a great tool find duplicate data on your site. Check out the screenshot below:
All search engines hate duplicate content.
Duplicate content on your site can also affect the ranking of your entire site.
You have to find and remove any duplicate pages on your website.
Duplicate content isn’t just copying data from one indexed page to another page.
This can also happen when more than one links point to the same page.
You have to find such pages and either remove them or put rel = “canonical” tag in the URL of duplicate pages.
8. Mobile Issues
According to Statista, 52.2% of all web traffic in 2018 came from mobile devices.
That’s more than half of your traffic.
Is your site well optimized for mobile users?
If not, bad user-experience will negatively impact your rankings and you will face the issue of your SEO not working.
You can test mobile-friendliness of your website on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
9. Old Low-Quality Content
Even if you are creating high quality content and doing everything right, your past mistakes can still affect your site today.
You need to update all old low-quality content pages on your site or they may come to punish you in the future – if they already haven’t.
All leading SEOs recommend and use this for SEO enhancement. They update their content according to new trends so it doesn’t feel outdated.
There are also other benefits to it.
For example, Google checks the number and magnitude of updates you make in your article. It prefers fresh content.
This practice will save you from bad content and keep your good content up to date.
10. Wrong Use of Internal Links
This may not sound like a big issue but is significant enough to have made place in Neil Patel’s shared 5 SEO mistakes.
Wrong use of internal links can be one of the reasons why your SEO doesn’t work.
There is also a proper way to use internal links if your goal is SEO enhancement.
You have to use relevant internal links with anchor text in them.
Instead of adding a link in text like ‘click here’, ‘see more’; you should link the portion that tell about the link.
For example:
If you are linking to an article about body building tips in your website, then you should include ‘body building tips’ in the anchor tag – that text is your anchor text.
Internal links can harm your rankings and even cause a Google penalty if over-optimized.
11. Expecting Immediate Results
One can’t be sure how much time it will take for a website to rank.
There is even no guarantee if it will rank.
You have to give it some time before can expect any results.
Don’t worry if your other site or your friend’s site has ranked faster than you.
Some sites take longer than others for SEO to affect.
12. Low Quality Backlinks
It’s nothing too technical to understand that backlinks have a great impact on the ranking of your site.
The way good backlinks improve your ranking, bad links can damage your rankings and may even get you a penalty from Google.
Quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity of backlinks.
If you have a thousand backlinks and none of them are relevant to your site, then don’t expect any results from them.
Backlinks are recommendations to your websites.
Why would Google listen to what a medicine expert (site of medical niche) has to say about tech site?
You have to get relevant links from high authority websites. This article SEMrush Blog will help you differentiate between good and bad links.
A recommended practice is to remove links that may be harmful to your site and build more high quality backlinks.
13. You Have a Tough Competition
There is a possibility that your rankings have stopped improving because your competition is too tough.
This is why it is important to monitor your competition.
Watch their rankings, keywords, shares, and backlinks.
If they have better ranking than you then you need to find out how.
What is it that they do and you don’t.
Brainstorm how you can outrank them.
Top ranking is never guaranteed when you have an active competition.
Even if you do achieve higher rankings, it will still keep fluctuating.
That being said, such high competition niches also have a high return – so you don’t have to change your niche just because there is too much competition.
