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SEO is a fantastic digital marketing strategy that can yield long-term results.
But, many startups find their SEO strategy to be ineffective.
SEO requires a lot of hard work. When you don’t see results from SEO, you’ll be frustrated.
So, you’ll most likely give up your SEO goals and focus on other strategies. Are we correct?
But, you shouldn’t do so.
If your SEO strategy isn’t working, there will be some factors that you did wrong. By correcting them, you can make SEO work for your business.
In this blog, we have made a list of the reasons why your SEO strategy isn’t working. Also, we have given the solutions to fix the issues.
Let’s get started!
Reason #1: Writing low-quality content
If you want to succeed in SEO, you should write high-quality content. This is a must!
If your content is of low quality, people won’t read them. If people don’t read your content, Google won’t rank your website high in the search results.
If you’re publishing low-quality content on your website, here are the tips that you can utilize to improve the quality of your content.
- Perform thorough research on the topic you’re going to write about. By doing so, you can provide accurate information to the readers.
- Don’t overpromote your products. Users don’t come to your website to buy your product. Instead, they come expecting a solution to their problem. So, you should first satisfy people’s expectations. Once you do so, you can promote your product in a place or two.
- Be honest with the readers. If you want to build trust with your readers, you should be honest with them.
- Write reader-friendly content. When writing content, you should always make sure that it’s easy to read and understand. Moreover, your content should be engaging.
Reason #2: Offering a poor user experience
If you want to succeed in SEO, you should offer a good user experience.
Nowadays, thanks to the advancement of technology, website owners can easily optimize their websites and offer a good user experience.
However, there are still many websites that aren’t even mobile-friendly.
Yes, you heard us right!
There are many factors that influence the user experience of a website. Among them, we have listed some of the prominent factors below.
- Loading speed: Nowadays, there are many resources available on the internet. If your website loads slowly, users will click on the back button and visit someone else’s website. So, it’s essential that you make your website load fast.
- Mobile-friendliness: In recent times, many users browse the internet through smartphones. This made Google consider mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. So, if you haven’t optimized your website for smartphones, make sure to do so immediately.
- Use shorter paragraphs: Let’s face the fact. Reading induces sleep! So, if you want to keep users awake when reading lengthy content, you should write engagingly. Moreover, use shorter paragraphs. Using shorter paragraphs will increase the white space, which will, in turn, increase the legibility.
- Add images: Adding graphs, infographics, images, and other attractive graphical elements will increase the attractiveness of your content.
- Use consistent design: If you have a consistent design across different pages of your website, you’ll seem more professional.
If your website lacks any of these factors, you can correct them and check whether your website’s SEO is improving
Reason #3: Using black-hat SEO strategies
Black-hat SEO strategies refer to using techniques that are against search engine guidelines.
Black-hat strategies usually try to manipulate the search engine algorithm to increase a website’s ranking in search results.
Manipulating search engine algorithms may have been possible a few years back. But now, search engines have got a lot smarter, and it’s nearly impossible to manipulate them without getting into trouble.
If you use black-hat SEO strategies, your website’s ranking may decrease in the search results, which will, in turn, reduce the number of visitors to your website.
Moreover, using black-hat SEO strategies can negatively impact the user experience of your website.
Below we have listed some of the black-hat SEO strategies.
- Cloaking – Providing different content for users and search engines.
- Keyword stuffing – Repeating the focus keyword several times in the content.
- Link buying – Buying links from other websites to build backlinks to your website.
- Misleading redirects – Setting up redirect links such that it sends users and search engines to different pages.
- Hiding text – Hiding the text to stuff keywords and manipulate search engines.
If you’re using any of these strategies to increase the ranking of your website in the search results, stop using them immediately because they may be the reason behind your SEO not working.
Reason #4: Targeting the wrong audience group
If you want SEO to work for your business, you should define your target audience.
Once you define your target audience, you should write blogs for them.
Wait! Don’t start writing the blogs just yet!
Before writing the blogs, you should perform keyword research to find out the phrases that your target audience uses in the search engine.
You can use tools such as Wordtracker to perform keyword research.
Once you perform keyword research, you can correctly include the keywords in your blog. This will make your blog visible to your target audience when they search for those keywords in the search engine.
Ok.
If you write content without defining your target audience, you can’t get the right people to view your blog.
If your content is well optimized for SEO, you may get visitors to view your content. But, since they aren’t your target audience, you can’t expect them to convert into customers.
If you feel that your content isn’t suitable for your target audience, you should stop and figure out the content your target audience is looking for. Once you do so, you can write content on that topic.
Reason #5: Not utilizing other digital marketing channels to drive traffic to your website
Initially, if you solely rely on SEO to drive traffic to your content, getting a reasonable amount of traffic can take a lot of time.
However, if you use various digital marketing channels like email marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising, etc., you can drive traffic much faster. By increasing the traffic, you’re also improving the SEO of your content.
Ok.
If you aren’t utilizing other digital marketing channels to drive traffic to your content, we suggest giving them a try.
Initially, you can start with social media marketing. You can open an account on popular social media platforms and publish valuable content related to your niche.
Next, you can try email marketing. You can create a lead magnet and use it to collect people’s email addresses. You can then promote your blog to your email subscribers through email.
If you have a sufficient budget, you can also try PPC advertising. PPC advertising can yield quick results, but the results aren’t long-term.
Moreover, if you don’t know how to run PPC ads, you may end up losing a lot of money.
Reason #6: Not being patient
SEO is a strategy that takes quite some time to see results.
You may not see good results from SEO even after months of hard work. But, you shouldn’t give up.
If it’s just been a few weeks since you started SEO, we suggest you wait for at least six months to see some results.
In the meantime, you can ensure that you’re using the correct SEO strategies.
If you find that your SEO strategy doesn’t work even after waiting for six months, we suggest you look into these reasons and check what’s preventing your SEO from working.
