🚀 Top 8 Reasons Your Website Isn’t Ranking High
Website and business owners often think that building a website is enough to rank high and bring traffic. That isn’t how it works. Optimizing a website to get noticed by web crawlers involves strategy. A website that isn’t ranking high enough to generate traffic needs help. Here’s a look at the top 8 reasons for low search engine rankings and how to fix them.
🪶 1. Light Content
Content that doesn’t offer any substance are just words. They don’t help you rank. Light content is typically short paragraphs used with mostly pictures and that screams to add more. They don’t answer the questions website viewers have when they come to the site.
📋 2. Duplicated Content
This is a serious problem when people use AI to write content. AI will rewrite the same sentence five times to fulfill set requirements for sections or word count. The same sentence will be rewritten several times to add more words or sections. See what I did there? Eliminate duplicate content.
There are free programs that will analyze your content to see if it’s too light or duplicated and it will send you a report. You can use that to fix problem areas.
🎯 3. Wrong Search Intent
Search engines look for high-quality content with information that follows the user’s search intent. Providing correct search intent requires analyzing your keywords. Pull up the first three or four websites in the search with your keywords to see if those websites have the same intent as yours. If it misses the mark, restructure your content to share the correct intent.
⚔️ 4. Too Much Keyword Competition
Search engines look at keywords and pair them with the best websites with the strongest backlinks and most relevant content. That makes some getting action on some keywords highly competitive. This is particularly true when a small company is using the same keywords as a large competitor.
To fix this, use long-tail keywords or geographic keywords. It will narrow searches but will place your website higher in front of people looking for those things or near your location.
🔗 5. A Sparse Backlink Profile
A backlink profile builds authority for your website. Backlinks are links to authoritative sources or from authoritative sources to your website. Websites that show a connection to reputable websites and companies will get a higher ranking.
You can build your backlink profile in a couple of ways. The best way is to get your content included on a blog for an authoritative site in your industry with a link back to your content.
The second way is to link to an authoritative site when quoting data and facts. This shows trustworthiness and facts. The best backlinks come from a variety of assets like infographics, research, tools, guides, maps, and videos.
⚙️ 6. A Lack of On-Page Optimization
Those who build their business websites often don’t know about the little details that go with it and leave some important on-page optimization elements out. That can affect their ranking.
Some common errors are a lack of meta descriptions, title tags, and optimized headings. Formatting issues are also a problem as people have long paragraphs with many grammatical and spelling errors. A third problem is keyword stuffing where they put the target word or phrase throughout content with no context. Keywords and phrases should be used naturally.
An SEO audit, like the free one Rank Secure offers, can identify these problems where you can fix them.
🔍 7. A Lack of Indexing
A website must be on Google’s index to be seen. Many times, this becomes a problem when there is a protocol not to index or allow search engine spiders to crawl a page. You can check your websites indexing from the Google Search Console.
⚠️ 8. You Have a Website Penalty
Many who build their business websites inadvertently encounter a website penalty. This can be hard to correct but can be fixed. You can find out if you have a penalty from the Google Search Console. Google offers correction instructions. We at Rank Secure can assist with correcting this problem also because we are accustomed to dealing with Google and working on websites’ backend.
⏰ Fixes Won’t Get You Immediately Ranked Higher
The part of correcting website problems for optimization and higher ranking is that they won’t jump to the top rank tomorrow. It takes time for the crawlers to index the content and rank it. Expect it to take one to three months to see any changes and between six months to a year to see significant changes.
Even though there won’t be immediate dramatic changes in search engine rankings, you will see some quicker results in the amount of traffic to your site. That lets you know the changes are working.
📊 We Know the Metrics
Rank Secure can look at all the key metrics to find out what works best for your website. We do our free site analysis, set up an action optimization plan, and tweak it as needed to give you great results. Call us to set up your free SEO and website audit today!
Frequently Asked Questions
It doesn’t take a long time to figure out the problems on your website. Software programs show a lot of where problems lie. Our free website audit can do it pretty fast.
Some problems, like content issues, don’t require coding but some backend issues may require coding. Most problems can be easily fixed once you know what they are.
Ideally, you will get a lot more website traffic which translates into more conversions. You will also get more phone calls and contact forms sent to you.
Keywords have been downplayed recently because Google is emphasizing search intent but they still play a significant role. There are programs that help you pick the right keywords for your intent and content.
