Is Your Website Performing Poorly on Search Engines? Here’s How You Can Fix It

You want to launch a website for your business so you put in all the necessary work to make sure that your site is visible to your target audience. So you take the time to write engaging content, add relevant links, and launch the website to start welcoming your visitors and earn a lot of business.

Weeks go by; your site’s not performing the way you want. Everything looks good but your site’s search rank just isn’t what you’re hoping to get for your target keywords. Why?

The truth of the matter is that even if you think you’ve done the best that you could to make your SEO strategy perfect, Google or other search engines, thinks otherwise. You just need to understand how search engines rank websites and what you can do to improve your strategy.

There are many different reasons why sites don’t perform well on search engines. While search engine optimization sounds as simple as writing content filled with keywords and building plenty of relevant links, the actual practice of SEO isn’t as simple. There are complex algorithms to consider, site age, your competitors, and relevance to your niche, among others.

In order to find a solution to your search ranking woes, we’ve compiled a list of possible reasons why your site isn’t doing so good and what you can do to fix these problem areas to beat your competition and gain search engine ranking success.

 

Reasons for Poor Performance

1. Your Keywords are too Competitive

There are certain keywords that are so competitive that it would be very difficult to achieve a high rank if you use those keywords. This is primarily one of the reasons why some websites fail to rank. The more competitive the keyword you want to target, the stronger your website needs to be.

Before launching your website, be aware of the competition you will be facing for the keyword you are targeting. Remember that you are not the only trying to reach the top ranking position and you’re competing against every one of those websites. Do your research on keywords you are targeting and analyze your competitors using different software available on the internet to understand the competition for your keyword before you start creating content and building links.

2. Your Pages are not SEO-optimized

Sometimes the reason for not performing well on search engines is because pages are not properly optimized for organic searches. Factors such as page titles, XML sitemaps, and keyword density all play an extremely important in letting Google figure out what your website is all about. Even if you have relevant content supported by strong backlinks, it will all mean nothing if your pages are not properly optimized for search engines.

In order to optimize your page for SEO, you should be aware of several actionable tactics to give your website effective title tags, meta descriptions, and the right structure for on-page SEO. These can range from creating an XML sitemap for your website so Google can find and index all of its pages and adding canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues, to crawling your website to make sure it isn’t held back by errors.

3. You Don’t Have Enough Links

You’ve done everything to the letter – you analyzed your competitors, optimized your website’s on-page elements, and created the best content for your niche. However, your site is still nowhere near the top page. What gives?

If your site still isn’t reaching the first page despite having done every step by the letter, it could mean that your site doesn’t have enough links. Google gives high priority to websites that are considered an authority within the niche. Google’s algorithm uses your relevance (the topic you’re discussing) and approval (inbound links from relevant websites) to consider your site as an authority.

As a general rule, the greater the number of links pointing to your website, the higher your rank should go. However, the quality of the links is also considered so you can’t go creating a bunch of pages and link it to your own site. The links should come from high-standing websites in your niche.

4. Your Link Building Practices are Bad

If you used to rank because of target keywords but lost the rank later on, it may be because of a manual or algorithmic penalty imposed on you by Google because of your link building practices.

Google knows about questionable SEO practices used by other webmasters, such as private blog networks, paid links, spam links, and hacked links, to raise their site’s rank. Because of such practices, it launched actions such as the Penguin updates and mass de-indexing to fight back against unethical link building.

 

Improving Your Website’s Search Performance

Optimizing your website for organic searches on Google is not something you can hope to do overnight. It is a gradual process that, when done right, produces long-term results.

In order to fix your website’s performance, you should first begin with identifying what went wrong. It can be anywhere from poor on-page optimization to having too few links, and each of these factors can stop your website from achieving the ranking it deserves. Once you’ve found the issue, it should then be easier to fix the problems preventing your website from ranking.