Reaching the top spots of the search engine results pages can improve your company’s exposure, establish you as an industry authority, and deliver the kind of ROI you want to see.
So why isn’t your website ranking at the top yet?
That’s the million-dollar question that every company has asked itself at one point or another. Unfortunately, there isn’t a million-dollar answer.
Or, at least, there isn’t one single million-dollar answer.
Your website might be struggling to reach the top for any number of reasons. So, if it feels like you’ve been at it for a long time without getting the best results, consider these possibilities:
You Haven’t Given It Enough Time
According to this Google Webmaster video, you need to be patient when it comes to SEO.
There’s no way around it. SEO is not an overnight process.
Things need to be done, and they need to be done in order. (It will do you no good to build a bazillion links if they all go to a website that isn’t able to convert the traffic.)
It takes time to research, create, and implement a strategy and begin producing content.
Then it takes more time for Google to realize changes have been made, and then you have to wait for the search engine to determine if you are really providing new value.
We’ve linked the above video before, but we like to back up our claims like this whenever possible.
In it, she states that, in general, it takes four months to a year to first implement improvements and then for you to start seeing results.
In other words, time is something that you can’t avoid. It’s hard, but SEO requires patience.
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Your Keyword May Not Mean What You Think It Should
This is our experience with the term “SEO.”
That keyword is obviously important for us (which we discussed in our blog about increasing traffic more than 200%). At one point, though, our homepage couldn’t be found for that term at all. We didn’t do anything to the page to make it drop out of the rankings, it was just gone one day.
So, we really started looking at the environment of search results page for that word.
We had been ranking on the second page for a long time, only ever able to crack #10 on occasion. And then it disappeared.
Our blog page, however, didn’t.
Turns out, when you really look at that first page, it’s easy to see that Google does not believe people searching for the term “SEO” are looking for a company to do the SEO for them.
Instead, they’re trying to provide as much information about what SEO is or how it is done.
That’s why (not including paid results) nearly every result on the first page is a guide to SEO, a discourse on what SEO is, and whether you need it.
Google itself is currently hogging at least 2 spots on the front page.
So, for a while, we were of the opinion that we simply couldn’t rank our homepage on the first page anymore. It’s simply not what Google considers an appropriate answer to the query of “SEO”.
(Of course, just to prove us wrong, Google began ranking our homepage again. We’re currently the only agency site that ranks on the first page.)
The point of all this is that you may want to rank a certain page for a certain keyword, and despite all the good SEO you do, it never quite seems to break for you because the word means something different to you than it does to Google.
Take a closer look at the first page and see if maybe the types of results Google wants to show are different from the kind you want to provide.
Your Website May Look Great, but It’s Beauty is Only Skin Deep
You’ve paid a lot for a well-designed and very modern website. Everything about it looks great. You check it out on a daily basis just to appreciate the design a little more.
Why doesn’t Google appreciate it the way you do?
It’s possible that your design may look great but hasn’t accounted for every SEO angle.
There could be any number of things holding you back, including:
- Duplicate content
- Insufficient content
- Old, untouched, stale content
- Confusing navigation
- Split keyword focus, so there are multiple pages that could rank for a given word
- Incomplete basics, such as metas, alt tags, and schema markup
- No blog or other way to continually refresh your content
You Have Gone Unnoticed by the Web at Large
Links are still a thing, and probably always will be. And while there’s a bajillion ways to get them, not all of them are worth having, and some could be detrimental.
You need a good portfolio of links from various sources. Some should be no-follow, some should be from really good sites, some should be just normal sites.
Buying links is out of the question. Link schemes, also bad. It’s important to find natural ways to increase the good links and avoid the ones that may raise flags for Google.
Of course, links could be a problem in another way, too.
For example:
You’ve Been Noticed by the Wrong Part of the Web
Some people may start using some unethical tactics on your website.
They don’t actually need a reason to do this. They may simply choose your website as a target to inject malicious code. Or they may start scraping your blog and republishing all your content. Or they could start building countless links to your site from questionable websites.
Google is pretty good at spotting a negative SEO attack, but you don’t want to risk the kind of penalty that could result from it, so stay on guard.
And this brings us to our next entry:
Google May Have Put You in the Penalty Box
A Manual Action penalty can completely remove your website from Google’s search results.
If you’ve previously ranked really well and then dropped significantly (if not completely out of the rankings), you may be on the wrong side of a penalty.
The only thing you can do is check the Google Manual Actions report and start correcting the issues.
If you have received one of these reports, it means a human reviewer has determined that your website is no longer compliant with Goggle’s guidelines.
What could cause a Manual Action? According to Google, you could be penalized if the reviewer determines that you have:
- A hacked site – Someone has uploaded and hidden malicious content on your site.
- User-generated spam – Spam comments on forums or blogs.
- Spammy freehosts – A significant portion of the pages hosted on a service are spammy.
- Spammy structured markup – Markup on the page is outside the guidelines, like making some content invisible to users.
- Unnatural links to your site – If you have a lot of links deemed artificial, deceptive, or manipulative (including buying links or participating in link schemes), you may be penalized.
- Unnatural links from the site – Same as above, but now they’re coming from your site.
- Thin content with little or no added value – Your pages need to offer some real value to users.
- Cloaking or sneaky redirects – I.e., showing different pages to users and to Google.
- Pure Spam – This includes most of the stuff already mentioned, just more aggressive and overt.
- Cloaked images – Manipulative use of images in order to get more clicks.
- Hidden text and keyword stuffing – These are oldies but goodies, and apparently it’s still enough of a problem for Google to list it here.
You’re Treating Your Website Like It Exists in a Vacuum
SEO does not exist in a vacuum. It lives right here with its neighbors: content marketing, social media, PPC, and many other online endeavors.
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We’re not just trying to sell you on our other services, here. Online marketing is simply a far more holistic strategy than it once was.
Elements like time on site, number of clickthroughs, number of mentions around the internet, and engagement on social media all figure into your rankings.
Granted, some of them affect your rankings more indirectly than others, but they all play an important role.
Google is looking at more signals than just those you’re putting out on your website.
We’re not saying that posting regularly on Facebook is directly connected with better rankings. We’re saying that building a community on social media will lead to more people visiting your site, clicking your links, and reading your content.
And all of those things can lead to more than just better rankings.
These days, though, the most common reason your website isn’t ranking is probably:
Your Competition Is Doing More Than You
You’re not doing SEO in a vacuum.
Search engine optimization is no longer a secret technique that your competition has never heard of. It’s an integral part of modern marketing, and for every link you’re not building and every blog you’re not publishing, your competition is.
So, if you start to think you don’t need it, or if you start to think you’ve done enough, then there is someone working really hard to show you how it really should be done.
If you’ve been dipping your toes into SEO, you may start to see a little movement up the rankings. However, the simple fact is that those who wade out into the deeper end of SEO are going to see more results than you.
Remember, when you start doing SEO, it isn’t you against Google. It’s you against all your regular competition. And you’re all aiming to set up shop in a very limited space.
Even Small Changes Can Make a Difference
You may be thinking that there is a lot to do to start climbing to the top of the search engine rankings.
And you’d be right.
However, that’s just more of a reason to get started now. You can begin by making some small and simple changes to your website, even before you start thinking about whether you should hire an agency or go in-house for your SEO.
If you’re not ranking yet, you may just need to give it a little more time.
Or…
You may need to dive into a serious overhaul of your website.
Either way, examine your current situation, start small, and begin making the changes you can.
You may be surprised how much they help.
SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Download this ebook and see how all these components fit together to help you build your rankings.
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WHY ISN’T MY WEBSITE RANKING? This is the common question that everyone faces. I feel you have given a better description to solve the problem. Good job. Thank you for the information.
yes i agree with your answer.According to me also the more competitive your target keywords are, the more SEO work it will take for your website to reach the first page.One of the most common reasons websites fail to rank is that they target search keywords with a huge amount of competition. The tougher the competition, the stronger your website needs to be in order to rank on the first page (and especially in the top few positions).Poor on-page optimization etc.Thats why your website is not ranking list.
What does “Even Small Changes Can Make a Difference” means? I get that there is something out of sight. For instance you will increase your rank if you change a little something but you can not see it. So make no headway. Right?
That’s a good question, and as I look back over that section of the blog, I realize I really should have gone into a little more detail (instead of just using it as a way to sum up and bring the blog to a close).
Anyway, what I meant by that is that sometimes it’s easy to forget about the basics of SEO. People may want to rank for a certain term, but then realize that they haven’t actually included that term in the content on the page. They may have some relevant terms, but not that one. So maybe find a new way to include it naturally. Then, things like Title Tags and alt attributes are very small things, and may not have a huge impact, but they do have SOME impact, and they’re simple things that anyone can optimize. Hope that helps explain a little more what I meant.
Truly, our industry is frustrating. Let me go back, this is a great article, and I wish that business owners and website designers understood this. It pains me so much to hear from a business owner that they don’t trust any SEO companies due to the fact that they have been burned multiple times in the past, shotty work, over promising, or my favorite, “We built SEO into your website when we first put it up, money every month please”. Hell, I’ve seen claims of having SEO done to a website that had no sitemap, robots, a structure that would make you cringe, no H1’s, no description tags, essentially nothing, and the business owner wondered why they got no results. Sorry for the raving, but this is a huge passion piece of mine when so many companies are giving the rest of us a poor reputation even before we get to introduce ourselves.
I totally agree with you. This is something we have to deal with it on day to day basis. Especially when someone has misinformed or misguded business, its hard to explain that why we are trying to do something or why we need 3-4 months where others are promising them to rank #1 in Google in just one month. Once I met with a client who was guided by another seo person and he thought that writing his website name all over the internet (spamming) is okay and he couldn’t understand that why I’m not spamming at all.
In most cases it’s Time vs Expectations. Hard keywords take longer to rank and need more effort. Also using Google Search console it’s very useful if you are not looking to invest in paid tools, as the website might rank good, but for wrong keywords.
Hi Martin, yes, trying to rank for competitive, popular keywords will take significantly more time and effort. The Google Search console is a great resource for those looking for a free keyword tool to use.
I am going to try not to be paranoid now with all the negative stuff my site could be hacked and attacked with. This was very thought provoking and I am going to look back on some site security! Then, I am going to work on being patient and letting my site get some organic traffic by continuing to do keyword research and write great content. Thanks for all the info here – it really was helpful.
Yeah, that can definitely get nerve wracking, but don’t let the idea of malicious internet users get you down. We had a problem with scrapers a while back, taking and republishing all our content, and it was hurting our rankings. It took some time, but it did get sorted out eventually.
Your website should be “responsive”, this means when your site is viewed on a mobile phone or an iPad it will take the shape of that particular device.
True. Website responsiveness is critical to ranking. Most new websites are built with that in mind, but if the site was designed more than, say, 5 years ago, it may need to be revisited.
Thanks for your very informative inputs, I have been struggling to rank a website since the past 1 year, though took it from not ranking for any keywords to rank on 3 to 6 pages for most of the keywords but it has remained stuck there for a long time.
I think duplicate & insufficient content and hidden text can harm your website rankings. You can also called as negative SEO.
I think having toxic back links harm website ranking more than anything. Most of the time, owners don’t have any idea if they are having links pointing to them from bad neighborhood or have broken links at the first place.
One major issue not mentioned is the fact that performance of the website in terms of the page loading times and other performance factors can negatively affect SEO before content is even determined to be relevant. If your website is loading really slow or there are a ton of errors that cause loading issues, then you website is going to start on the back foot right off the bat.
That’s a good point, and you’ve got me remembering all the times clients have immediately jumped on the “why haven’t you written a million blogs for us yet” bandwagon. And we try to gently remind them that it doesn’t matter how many or how awesome such content is if we’re just dumping it on a site that still has some serious foundational concerns.
Such a great reminder about the cost, time and effort that goes into any worthwhile endeavor, especially SEO. Thanks Andy! http://www.1stchoicemoney.com
From my experience, almost everyone tries to experience with DIY Seo before consulting a Seo specialist and the major mistakes they keep doing is the keyword stuffing to the extent that one can not read through the main idea of the texts. Also i hardly come by proper meta tags and definitions on these sites.
Yeah. While there are definitely a lot of things that small companies can do on their own to kickstart their optimization efforts, its extremely important that they don’t try any major overhauls on their own without understanding all the potential ramifications.
This guide helped me a lot understand about Indexing of search engine bots. But the mistake I was made on site was, I did not create a sitemap and not submitting on Search console. That thing was screwed my blog and I dont get any traffics.
You’re definitely not alone on that one. A lot of websites we work with are lacking sitemaps. It goes back to those basics that need to be in place before a lot of the more complex SEO strategies can be done.
Hello! Can I ask a question
My website is ranking on the 2-3 page which is highly competitive.
I don’t know the reason why my website not ranking up for a long time.
You have solved my problem up to the extent. Thanks!
I think this is a great article to put what SEO really is into perspective for business owners. I’ve noticed other comments on here that talk about the frustration that comes along with a “bad apple spoiling the bunch” because of empty promises and minimal effort put into the SEO for business owners who don’t know much about how SEO works. There’s a great deal of stress put on business owners to be able to trust the web developer that they’re working with and an article like this helps them out. Good post.
yes i agree with your answer.According to me also the more competitive your target keywords are, the more SEO work it will take for your website to reach the first page.
Useful post. Blog and content marketing is very important part to back up all other SEO efforts but majority of the business owners do not focus on it because they don’t have time to write useful content for the end users, they lose big opportunity which can really pay off in long run in terms of high quality organic traffic
Great article, collaboration of SEO with blogging and marketing strategies are really the key to a more successful promotion of business which will lead to higher ranking.