You have a great looking, professionally built website, so why isn’t it ranking well in Google’s organic search results. There could be a number of reasons for this, but here are our top five reasons.
1. Your Website Pages are Not Well Optimized
There are some fundamental “on-page” optimizations that are very often overlooked by web designers. These usually include Title and Description meta tags that are poorly written. Lack of heading tags, or heading tags that don’t utilize targeted keywords. Web page URLs that are descriptive and include the targeted keyword. Thus, it is important to have a search engine friendly web design.
2. Your Website is Being Penalized by Google
In some cases, clients unwittingly hire a SEO company which uses “black hat” techniques that can get their clients’ website penalized by Google. Black hat refers to tactics that are in direct violation to Google guidelines. These tactics usually involve paid low quality backlink schemes and keyword stuffing.
3. Not Enough Backlinks
You could have a well-optimized website, but if you have little to no quality backlinks, then you can expect not to rank well for competitive keywords. Why? Because Google’s algorithm is set up to interpret more “quality” links pointing to your website as being more authoritative (important). As a result, all other things being equal, you should be more likely to rank ahead of your competitors who have fewer, quality backlinks.
4. Stiff Competition
If you are attempting to rank for some very competitive keywords, such as “mortgage rates” meaning there could be tens of millions, if not billions of results that are in some way relevant to the targeted keyword, then need to look at the strength of the top results. The number one result may have thousands if not tens of thousands of mostly good quality inbound links. These type of competitors can’t be easily overcome.
5. Low Quality and/or Not Enough Content
Have you heard of the phrase “content is king”? It’s been reported that Bill Gates coined this phrase in the mid 90’s. Well, when it comes to Google, If your content is very brief, it may not be substantial enough for Google to justify serving the web page that it comes from as a top result. Although Google does not specify a specific number of words per web page, it’s recommended that you create as much unique, quality content for each of your website pages as is necessary to adequately cover the topic with authority. That could be 300 words or 1,000 words. It may also depend upon the quality and quantity of content from your competitors’ website pages.
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