So, your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign is not doing as well as you thought it would. You’ve put time and effort into coming up with a strategy to push your company’s website higher on search engine result pages (SERP), and it just didn’t produce results. Your marketing team is baffled as to why things didn’t turn out the way the expected. There are a few things that could be why your SEO efforts fell flat. Let’s examine some possible reasons why your SEO didn’t meet expectations.
Your Website is Not Optimized for SEO
One of the most overlooked reasons for SEO not working is because companies fail to look at their website in regards to SEO. There are a number of things that can dissuade Google and Bing from listing your site. Among these are poorly written title tags, missing title tags, weakly put together URLs, not optimizing the site for mobile devices, or target keywords not matching the content. If your website has not been updated in a decade or more, then it will need a complete overhaul to ensure that these problems are rooted out.
Not Enough Relevant Keywords
You’ve probably heard cautionary tales of using too many keywords in your content and being blacklisted by Google for keyword stuffing. While it is true overusing keywords can get you in trouble with search engines, the opposite will get your company’s site ignored by search engines. What kind of keywords should you be using? Use keywords that are relevant to your business and are not so vague that they are never searched for by users.
Another simple but surprisingly common keyword issue is misspelled keywords. Misspelled keywords mean that your site will only receive searches when someone else misspells a keyword in the same way you did. Make sure not to use jargon only someone in a given field will understand, and do not use words that fell out of use fifty years ago. Using relevant and commonly used keywords will help get your site more hits on a search engine.
You’re Losing the SEO Race
One reason you may fail to rank better with search engines is that your competition is spending $5 for every $1 you spend. Also, they have hired capable SEO experts to guide them through the process who have significantly improved their SEO results. Your competitors may also be using pay per click (PPC) ads to help drive traffic to their websites, which gets noticed by the major search engines. So, this means that unless your company increases its inbound marketing budget, that you will always be looking for the leftover customers who just happen to stumble upon your company’s site.
Unfortunately, some of your competitors may not have any concept of ethics and will steal content from your website and paste it into their own. This practice of taking data and using it is known as “Content Scraping” and can be achieved with special software. It can hurt your SEO by making search engines believe that your company plagiarized material, and thus get penalized or blacklisted. You can perform searches on Google to find if your content has been stolen, while tedious, it is an effective method and could explain your lower SEO rankings. If you find that your data has been scraped, it can be a protracted battle to get it rectified. Hiring an SEO expert with experience in data scraping is your best bet to have the problem eliminated.
So, if your SEO is not performing the way it should, follow these suggestions, and you may see all your issues disappear. If not, MosierData can help. Contact us here or call 863-687-0000 to find out more.