5 Reasons Why Your SEO Efforts Aren’t Working
If you are have been doing SEO on your own and you haven’t yet reaped the benefits, it may be time to rethink your strategy. In many cases, the problem is caused by the fact that the business owner doesn’t understand that there is more to SEO than simply placing keyword phrases on a website. In fact, SEO success relies on many important factors that go far beyond keyword phrases. Here are 5 reasons why your SEO efforts aren’t working and what you can do about it.
Keyword Stuffing
One of the most common mistakes that occurs when we work with companies that do SEO on their own is keyword stuffing. Despite what you may have heard, using the same keywords over and over on your website will not help your business to get to the top. Instead you may end up with a Google Penalty for your site that could result in your site being ranked lower.
Bad Keyword Choices
Not every keyword is one that you should try to rank for. Instead of trying to target every possible keyword phrase that someone has used to visit your site, you need to focus on selecting the best keywords for your business. These should be realistic choices that you have the possibility of ranking for without spending a fortune. In addition, they should also be the keyword phrases that drive converting traffic to your business. Don’t waste your time with low competition keywords if they will not benefit your business with converting traffic. Just because you can rank for a particular keyword phrase, doesn’t mean that you should spend the time or money to do so.
Technical SEO Problems
While keyword selection is just one aspect of a sound SEO strategy, technical SEO problems with your website could also set you back. When it comes to resolving technical SEO problems, you need to review your site for issues, such as:
- images that aren’t SEO-friendly
- poor user experience
- broken links
- slow page load speed
- little focus on local SEO
- using Flash
These are just a few of the technical SEO problems that an SEO professional may suspect. The only way to determine if your site has issues is to undergo a full site audit for SEO purposes. Many of these issues are not ones that can simply be discovered in a few minutes, especially if your site has a large number of pages.
Poor Content
The days of getting a boost from poor content that is stuffed with keywords on your website are well over. As a result, you will need to make sure that you are not hiring cheap content providers to create content for your site. If you are using poor quality content on your site, you may notice that content-heavy pages on your site have a high bounce rate. You are only hurting your SEO efforts if you don’t care about what users see when they arrive on your site.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is another issue that companies have still not gotten the message about. If you are copying content from the pages of your own site to other pages on the site, you are likely hurting your SEO efforts.
When the same information appears on multiple pages of your site, the search engines becomes confused as to which page it should rank so that users can find the information that they need on your site. Instead of simply choosing a page to rank higher, the search engine may opt to automatically decrease the page rankings for all of the pages that are affected. This is why you must eliminate duplicate content from your website if you want to get the best rankings in the search engines.
To fix these problems, it is a good idea to have a competent SEO firm to review your current SEO strategy to help you identify the problems that need to be corrected. If you would like to request a free site review, contact Brian at Infintech Designs today to request your free SEO site audit and quote.
