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Appeasing the search engine gods can be difficult. If you’ve ever watched your competitor’s sites climb the rankings of the search engine results pages and wondered what you’re doing wrong, you aren’t alone. It’s a common pain point for a lot of growing businesses.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to help your site rank higher for the important keywords your prospects are searching for. SEO is a long play but a good investment when you remember that search engines tend to reward the same things your prospects are looking for. Get it right, and it’s a win-win for your business.
So what could be holding you back from ranking? Here are 5 things that frequently impact SEO results.
1. Your Website Design
The design of your website plays a huge role in your SEO results. In the same way prospects are judging your website based on their ability to use it, search engines are judging your website based on factors like its usability, accessibility, mobile experience, and speed.
Of the factors we just mentioned, your site’s mobile experience is perhaps the most important. Mobile traffic now makes up over 50% of all web traffic. If you aren’t optimizing for mobile, you’re cutting a huge chunk of users out. And, since we already know search engines reward the things users like, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that search engines reward good mobile experiences accordingly. And this isn’t just a data thing; Google has been very open about this fact.
Here are a few other site design issues that can impact your SEO rankings:
- Slow page loading speeds
- Poor site security
- High-quality images and designs
- Simple, easy to use navigation
- High readability and accessibility
While these factors are likely to negatively impact your site’s SEO, there are proven ways to fix all of them. Don’t give up!
2. Domain Age
SEO rankings are a bit like credit scores in some ways. One of the biggest similarities, though, relates to their length of existence. Just as creditors like to see old accounts on your record, search engines like to see websites that have been around for a while.
This doesn’t mean you can’t secure an influx of website traffic with a new domain. Due to underhanded strategies to artificially boost SEO rankings, achieving this is more difficult than it should be. In the past, many companies have started new domains to achieve an influx of new traffic, which put search engines on high alert.
The solution to this problem? Don’t start a new domain just to get traffic. And if your domain hasn’t been around for a while, focus on making your website experience the best it can be, and give it time!
3. Your Local Search Results
While a great website design can help you climb the rankings ladder on Google, it can be impacted by your location in ways that might surprise you. People once typed in what they were looking for along with their city. Google now searches locally all on its own.
This means being further away from a city’s center can reduce your ability to rank high. While this algorithm feature is beneficial in many ways, it can also unfairly restrict your site. Why should an inferior competitor rank higher just because they’re closer to the consumer?
Optimizing your local search practices can help with this. One of the simplest ways you can take advantage of this is Google My Business. This Google property allows you to keep your information up to date and engage with customers for free. Since Google owns this platform, you can fully expect it to take precedence over other sites.
4. Your Content
There are many ways to boost your website SEO rankings, but as they say, “content is king.” Google loves organizations that frequently provide new content, and an up-to-date blog is a great way to do this. Best of all, if you stand out as an industry thought leader, you can climb the ranks quickly.
The thing most people get wrong when it comes to content is that it’s not about just providing content and watching the customers flock to you. You must offer them quality content. If 5,000 people click on your page but back out of it in less than 30 seconds because your content doesn’t provide value, search engines take notice.
By frequently posting new blogs, you also give yourself more opportunities to naturally add keywords. While the number and volume of keywords is one small piece of the SEO puzzle, it’s an important way to signal what your site is about to search engines. No matter how you look at it, an onsite blog can do wonders.
5. Your Social Media
It’s easy to forget that social media pages are websites on their own, and highly ranked ones at that. If you haven’t created social media pages for your business, you’re missing out on powerful ways to market your business while giving your website powerful backlinks.
Of course, social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms can also boost your SEO rankings indirectly by boosting your authority and traffic. This can lead to increased backlinks and other organic influences.
Scoring Big With SEO Rankings
The amount of website traffic you experience could be affected by one or all of these factors. Even if you’re lightyears ahead of your competitors in website design, for instance, they may still perform better on search engines due to their up-to-date content strategy. We like to tell our clients that SEO is a long play. In some cases, it can take up to a full year to see the results of your efforts. And that can be frustrating, especially if you aren’t quite sure what needs to be fixed to see the best results.
That’s where we come in. Advice Media has more than 20 years of experience helping practices just like yours increase their search visibility and improve their rankings. Contact us to speak with one of our representatives. We’ll help you figure out the pain points and come up with a plan.
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