Are your SEO efforts hitting rock bottom? It may be time to revisit your strategies before it’s too late.
2022 is expected to be big for SEO. Important trends such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) , RankBrain, mobile-first indexing , and the latest developments in Google’s algorithms will continue to set the course over the next 12 months. This will make a lot of old strategies and techniques obsolete, and will shift the ground for those whose SEO strategies are not up-to-date.
If your performance is waning already, here are eight top reasons why that might be the case, and how to change what you’re doing to get back on track.
Most Common Reasons SEO Campaigns Fail (And What to Do About Them)
1. Your website is outdated
A few main aspects of your website may be the cause for it to rank poorly. These are:
Website Architecture
A website structure that is too complex and requires users to make three or more clicks to get to the page they’re interested in is a common reason for increased bounce rates. Difficult navigation between pages and drop-down menus with too many links are the other main culprits.
Solution:
Some best practices you should aim for when working on your website structure are:
- Main pages should be available from a header on the homepage
- Site structure should follow a logical and predictable order
- Use breadcrumbs to help with navigation
- Optimize HTML and CSS code to improve crawlability
By improving your site structure you may be awarded sitelinks by Google’s algorithm, which in turn will significantly improve your performance in SERPs.
Website Speed
Site speed is an important ranking factor. Just by improving the loading time for your site, you may see improvement in ranking. One of the best ways to assess speed is Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Run a test for your domain to see suggestions for improvement.
Solution:
Common things that can be improved are:
- Upgrade your server or invest in better hosting
- Use external hosting (e.g. Dropbox or AWS) for large files
- Resize and compress images
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver images
- Minimize redirects
- Clean up your code
2. You Haven’t Nailed On-Page SEO
Some common on-page SEO elements and best practices which you may be missing or need to update could be dragging your website down. Here are the most important ones:
URL
A poor URL structure is confusing to both users and search engines. Make sure that your URLs are:
- Clear, simple, short, and descriptive (avoid numbers)
- Follow a logical order that mimics your website structure — make URLs guessable
- Include main keywords (but not excessively)
- Separate different words in URLs with hyphens , instead of underscores, but do not overuse hyphens either
Meta Tags
Adding good and relevant meta tags is important for the way your page will appear in SERPs. Your title tag and your meta description are the two most important aspects of your meta tags. To improve your meta tags:
- Include the primary and secondary keyword in the title tag + brand name
- Don’t go above 60 characters in your title tag
- Use unique title tags for every page
- Aim for relevance, avoid keyword stuffing
- Make the H1 heading different from the title tag
Link Structure
On-page SEO is not complete without a good link structure and without cleaning up your broken links. The more internal links you have that go deep and are relevant, the better for users and for your ranking. Here are some things to keep in mind for your internal links:
- Link between pages and posts on your site including to “deep” content
- Use relevant links
- Make anchor text comprehensive, natural, and relevant (do not over-optimize)
- Use follow links
- Do not link excessively
You should also take care of broken links, especially if you have hundreds of pages on your website. Broken links hurt the indexing of your page, drive away users, and increase the bounce rate.
Schema.org and RankBrain
Machine learning, or RankBrain , is now Google’s third most important ranking factor for websites. This means that the easier it is for the algorithm to interpret your page, the better your page is likely to rank. To anticipate and meet the growing demands that RankBrain will be placing on websites, you should consider implementing a schema markup on your website.
Schema markups are a way of structuring the data on your website so that it can be understood universally by search engines. Schema works as a “map” that indicates to search engines what type of information is contained in each element of your page. By knowing what things on a website mean, search engines can better pick out the content that will be useful and helpful to users in response to their search queries.
3. You’re Stuffing Keywords
Keyword stuffing can destroy your SEO efforts.
When you optimize your website, you will be tempted to use shortcuts (Blackhat SEO) to speed up the ranking process. But you need to understand that Blackhat SEO methods won’t help you in 2022. It will hurt your overall SEO efforts.
Keyword stuffing is an unethical method of using keywords multiple times in a web page or content to achieve high rankings on search engines. Unfortunately, some businesses are still using this method for short-term gain.
These are some of the common types of keyword stuffing:
- Repeating the same keywords or phrases multiple time
- Adding keywords that are not related to the context of the content
- Using keywords that are not relevant to the topic of the content
Solution: Focus on producing content that adds value to your visitors. Answer the questions that your potential customer has in their mind. Avoid inserting keywords for the sake of ranking high on search engines. Make the keywords appear naturally within your content. Read about BERT and NLP . Add your keywords to your page title, meta description, headings, and keep your keyword density 1-1.5%. Let’s say you’re developing 2,000 words of content; you should not use your keyword more than 15 times.
4. You’re Ignoring Long-Tail Keywords
If you’re not using long-tail keywords in your SEO campaigns, then you’re missing 70% organic search traffic. As generic short-tail keywords are hard to rank for, it is more suitable to focus on long-tail keywords instead.
Do you know why you should target long-tail keywords?
- You can easily outrank your competition
- 90% of people use long-tail keywords to search
- Long-tail keywords enable the context of your content
- You will have better conversion using long-tail keywords
- Content that is focused on long-tail keywords provides more value to readers
Solution: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner , SEMRush , Ahrefs , and Google Autosuggest to find long-tail keywords. We would suggest using Google Autosuggest if you’re just starting. And keep your eyes on related searches at the bottom of search result pages. Always remember that questions can be long-tail keywords too. Browse Quora or niche-based forums and look at the questions people are seeking answers for. Target these keywords in developing your content.
5. You’re Building Low-Quality Backlinks
How do search engines like Google determine whether your site has more authority and credibility than your competitors apart from on-page SEO factors?
By looking at your backlinks. If you’ve got links from high authority websites, the search engine will consider your site to be a high authority site in your niche. Just think about the voting system. When credible individuals vote for you, your credibility increases.
If you end up building low-quality irrelevant links from low-authority sites and sites linking out to too many websites, you surely know what search engines would think about your website.
Low-quality or bad backlinks come from websites that are solely focused on building links ( link farms ). Although Google’s Penguin update in 2012 has changed the way businesses build backlinks, still there are certain parties that resort to spammy link-building strategies.
It’s better to have zero links than to have hundreds or thousands of spammy low-quality links.
You can find whether your site has low-quality links with free and paid methods. The free method involves Google Search Console. Just click on “ Links ” and take a look at the list of domains linking to your web pages. Most of the time you will have links from directories and social media networks which helps your SEO. But there are also possibilities to find links that may harm your SEO efforts.
You can also tools like Monitor Backlinks , Ahrefs , and SEMRush (paid tools), to check your entire backlink profile and identify low-quality links.
But, how do you identify low-quality backlinks?
Ask the following questions and you’ll easily find backlinks that are harming your website:
- What kind of website is linking to my site? Check whether the site linking to your site is relevant to your niche and check the quality of outbound links. If they have hundreds of outbound links to other websites, it may be a bad website to be associated with.
- Does the link provide value to my business? If your answer is Yes, then you should keep it. If you don’t want your website mentioned on that site, it’s better to get it removed.
- Are there pages like About Us, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy on the website? If a website is spammy, there won’t be any important pages that often exist in a legit website.
Solution: Once you’ve identified low-quality links that are not relevant to your site, it’s better to remove them and maintain your site’s authority and credibility. You can use Google Search Console’s Disavow tool to remove those links. If you’re unable to do so, contact the website owner and request to remove the unwanted links.
6. Your Website Is Not Responsive on Mobile Devices
Responsive design is a trend in the website design industry. As Google emphasizes mobile responsiveness as a ranking factor and rolled out the mobile-first index, it has become a must for businesses to have a responsive website.
However, Google has not officially announced that responsive design is a ranking factor but mentioned that they prefer sites that offer a good user experience (UX) for the visitors. This means Google indirectly prefers responsive websites.
If your website is not responsive, you’re losing your visitors especially the ones using smartphones and tablets. As of February 2021, mobile has a 57.23% market share of Internet usage which shows that people are actively browsing websites from mobile devices.
Solution: If your site is not responsive on desktop and mobile devices, you should get it fixed right away. Hire the right website developers to work on your site. Don’t jeopardize your SEO efforts by ignoring the importance of responsive web design.
7. You’ve Been Penalized by Google
Ultimately, your SEO campaign may be failing because you’ve been penalized by Google. There are tens of reasons you may get penalized , though the most common ones are because of:
- A Panda penalty targeting low-quality content
- A Penguin penalty targeting bad backlinks
- A Mobilegeddon penalty targeting websites that are not mobile-friendly
- A Top-heavy penalty targeting websites that feature too many ads above the fold
How do you find out if you’ve been penalized?
A sudden drop in rankings for your brand name or organic traffic is one indication that you may have been penalized. Your PageRank has dropped for no particular reason or your entire page has been removed from Google’s cached results.
What should you do? If you’ve gotten penalized, don’t panic. Try to establish the cause for your penalty . Depending on the nature of your penalty, you may even need to suspend other SEO activities temporarily and focus your efforts entirely on getting the penalty lifted.
8. You’re Looking for Quick Results
If you’re looking for instant results from digital marketing efforts, SEO is not the right strategy that you should focus on. SEO is the best way to build consistent organic traffic for the long term. It’s an investment for future results.
It’s better to focus on other digital marketing efforts like Google Ads and Social Media Ads if you want to generate instant traffic to your website. But once you stop spending on paid ads, your traffic will instantly vanish.
When you start investing in SEO, you will see consistent growth in your search traffic in 6 to 12 months. Even if you decide to stop investing in SEO, you’ll still generate quality traffic from search engines.
Patience is a virtue. If you’re patient about your business growth, why don’t you have the same patience when it comes to SEO?
Enjoy the compounding growth effect with SEO for the long term if you’re serious about growing your business online.
Solution: Have 6 months or 12 months SEO plan in place. Consistently create and publish valuable content that is relevant to your business. Focus on educating your target market and slowly convert them into paying customers.
Final Thoughts
These are the most common SEO mistakes that lead to SEO failure. Are there any other reasons that you would add to this list?
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