Everyone – whether bloggers or businesses – wants their pages to rank high in search results. But actually getting them to do that can be a monumental struggle. It all seems so complicated. And no matter what you try to do, nothing works.
The gods of Google haven’t cursed you, though. There are usually concrete reasons why your SEO isn’t working and fixes you can apply. Here’s what to do.
Reason #1: Your Site Contains Duplicate Pages
Google and other search engines don’t take kindly to duplicate content and pages. They will often assume that you’ve plagiarized from another site and punish your URLs as a result, especially if you’re new.
You can understand their reasons for doing this. But mostly, if you’re a legitimate business, you’re not just cutting and pasting blogs from other websites, passing them off as your own. Instead, you’ve simply made an administrative mistake.
Check your site for duplicate pages, particularly if you’ve moved from HTTP to HTTPS. Make sure you set up the proper redirects and tell search engines that pages are the same with canonical links.
Reason #2: You Haven’t Set Up Google My Business
Google’s RankBrain ranks websites differently depending on whether you set up Google My Business or not.
Google My Business is just a way of telling Google that you have a business and its users can buy from it. Once you set it up, the location of your business will appear on Google Maps, alongside review information, opening times, and other things that users might find helpful.
Google’s algorithm is good at determining when a user is typing in a search query with “intent.” In other words, it can tell whether they want to buy something from you or are just entering information.
Reason #3: You’re Not Paying Attention To Social Signals
Many businesses would like to be more active on social media. But a lot of them simply don’t have the time.
That’s a problem though. It turns out that your social signals have an influence on where you rank on Google.
The best approach here, therefore, is to stay as active on your social media accounts as you can. You can either do this yourself, or you can hire an expert to take over the work for you. Either way, the more active you are, the higher you’ll rank.
Reason #4: You Don’t Create Consistent Content
Here’s another problem that businesses encounter: they’re not in the habit of creating consistent content.
In today’s market, there is tremendous demand for companies to continue churning out useful, helpful content for consumers. Search engines then take these contributions as a signal that the site is still active and engaging users, improving their rank.
Reason #5: You Didn’t Build Your Site For Mobile
Lastly, your site might be ranking poorly because you didn’t build it for mobile. Google and other search engines now penalize sites that fail to adapt their content for smaller screens.
If you’re not sure whether your website is mobile-friendly, then you can test it using a service provided by Google itself.
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