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Tom Welbourne, founder and director of The Good Marketer, discusses why your SEO strategies may not be working. He shares five things that could be going wrong and what you can do to correct them.
If your search engine optimization (SEO) it doesn’t work, it’s not your fault. You’ve gotten caught up in the typical SEO strategy of trying to rank for as many high-competition keywords as possible in the hopes that some of your traffic will turn into customers, instead of focusing on making make your SEO strategy more sophisticated.
Targeting the wrong keywords and/or targeting too many or too many keywords at once can prevent users from finding you in search results or generate large volumes of traffic that don’t convert. You want your content to be relevant to what people are searching for.
Good marketing on how to boost your SEO strategy.
Instead: search target. Think about how people would search for specific queries, such as local yoga classes.
It could be “yoga classes near me”, “benefits of yoga classes” or “how to start yoga classes”. These are unique keyword targets; a single keyword with multiple variations for users who have different ways of formulating their searches.
1. Your domain is coming back to you
It’s rare that you start a website from scratch. Google can provide information about the age of your domain, how much quality content it has published, and how many backlinks point to it. All of these factors determine the domain authority (DA) of your site.
A good DA means more people will see your pages when they search for your featured topics. If your domain score is low, no one will see your site.
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If you’ve just created a new website without backlinks or DA, your first step should be to create useful content that addresses topics related to what you do as a business or organization. Then you need to set up an outreach program to build links. This is the fastest way to fix a bad SEO strategy.
2. Your website is not mobile friendly
When someone lands on your website, the first thing they’ll notice is how quickly it loads on their device, especially mobile phones.
Today’s web users are impatient. If a page takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of visitors will bounce. Smartphone users won’t wait more than four seconds for a page to display. Annoying and expensive if people don’t stick around long enough to make a purchase.
Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool is good for measuring this. By entering your chosen URL, you can get an evaluation of how fast the website loads on desktop and mobile with recommendations for improvement.
3. Your content cannot be shared
Sharing content on social media is critical, but often overlooked in SEO strategy. It increases your organic search footprint as it helps build brand awareness and engagement through published content.
Poorly written generic blog posts rarely get shared. Neither do self-service articles that promote specific products or services, or pages that use stock images, graphics, and text to trick search engines.
Shareable content should be engaging, informative and engaging. It should also be well written, error free and have a clear call to action.
SEO can only do so much if your content isn’t high quality.
4. You haven’t built backlinks
The algorithms behind search engines are always changing, but the number and quality of backlinks (inbound links) will be evaluated when it comes to a site ranking higher in search results.
Adding links to articles helps send traffic and authority to those pages. Google looks at relevant backlinks when ranking websites.
Marketers should focus on integrating:
Internal backlinks, links to one of your own web pages from another web page on your website
External inbound links, links to a webpage on another website from one of your own webpages
Follow the links, submitting authority or link juice on the linked site
No tracking links, not sending authority or link juice to the linked site
5. You don’t use the right tools to measure your ranking
Tools are just as important as skills. If you’re already trying to improve your rankings and aren’t seeing results, the most likely reason is that you’re not using the right tools. How can you know what’s working if you don’t have a measurement system?
The following SEO tools can narrow your search:
Ahrefs – An SEO tool considered the best for keyword research and competitive analysis.
SEMRush – Software that allows you to research your competitors’ backlink portfolio by analyzing their link profile and comparing it to yours.
Google Search Console – Provides valuable data about your site that will help inform you of what improvements need to be made to start seeing results from your SEO efforts.
SEO is hard and search engines are constantly changing their algorithms. Fortunately, there are experts who can help you navigate the SEO waters to find success.
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