You have a great website, you love it, and you think your potential new customers would, too, but if only they could find it. Even worse is finding a sudden drop in your SEO rankings and all your hard work is gone!
Ranking in Google’s results is easier said than done. There are millions of different websites trying to steal your rankings and, in most cases, those competitors succeed. Of course, you don’t want them to. But beating their ranking isn’t a matter of simply publishing content and hoping for the best.
Appearing on the first page of search results, among millions of websites, puts your site in a reasonable position of being visited by users. Therefore, you just can’t afford to ignore this.
There are a variety of reasons why your site can face a drop in ranking. This article has put together a list of the most common reasons why you are not ranking. Let’s check them out.
If you have recently updated content on your site and a substantial amount of content is duplicated, it can negatively affect your site rankings.
According to Google Search Central, Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
You don’t want to create content, publish the content, and then find out that your SEO juice is getting split between the original page you created, and an unintended duplicate page. That would cause both pages to rank meagrely instead of just having only one page that is ranking exceptionally well.
If you have created a new page and it has blocks of content that are similar to other pages on your site including titles and tags, then that might also be considered as duplicate content.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this issue. Before you upload content, use a site audit tool to find pages containing any duplicate content. If any, you can use 301 redirects so that the old pages aren’t accessible by search engines or users.
If you write and publish a blog every now and then, you better think again. If you only record and publish a video when you are in the mood, that’s just not good enough. ‘Every now and then’ and ‘when you are in the mood’ are not doing you any good in your search for high website rankings.
For the vast majority of marketers, creating consistent content is a challenge. Many argue that it takes a lot of time to write, record, and edit content. It is even harder if you don’t get the results you hoped for immediately.
For a committed content creator, there is a dire need to have, and adhere to, a strict content marketing calendar and a practical growth strategy. Add due dates to your content and this will help keep you on schedule.
Frankly speaking, the more content you create, the better you become at what you do, and the more your site will rank. So long as the content is high quality.
According to a Hitwise study, nearly 60 percent of all Online Searches are now carried out on a mobile device, with some sectors, like Food and Beverage, reaching 72 percent.
Maybe you are doing everything else right, but if your site doesn’t have a layout or easy functions for use on a phone or tablet, you will not rank. This is because Search Engines are all about improving the user experience, and a responsive website is the first step in improving user experience.
Google was the first engine to move to the mobile-first index, that’s why a site that isn’t mobile-optimized will be severely penalized and will have trouble showing up in ANY search.
Google automatically suggests the changes that you need to implement on your website when you take Google’s mobile-friendly test. Afterwards, ask your developer to implement the changes or make your website completely responsive. This is necessary to ensure that it can be accessed by users irrespective of the device they are using.
Respectable websites linking to your site increases your digital profile and raises your website in the rankings. However, the wrong links do the exact opposite. Links from disreputable sites can easily earn your site a penalty and hurt your otherwise solid rankings.
The same applies to low-quality links. These are links created or purchased with the intention of manipulating the PageRank that directly impacts a site’s ranking in the search results.
To identify low-quality links, look for site messages under Search Console. If you have lots of unnatural links pointing to your site, the chances are high that Google will directly send you a message asking you to fix those links.
After identifying the list of URLs pointing to your site that are of low quality, try and remove them by sending an email to the webmaster and ask them to remove your link. It might take time, so please give the process at least 6-8 weeks to send and get responses to emails.
A rise in local competition can negatively affect your site rankings. Local competition is often fueled by the rise of multiple websites publishing similar content in the niche that you specialize. This subsequently leads to the emergence of more competitive keywords.
So, how do you identify competition? easy. Just enter your main business keywords directly in the Google search and identify your competitors. You can also use SEMrush to find your new online competitors, discover what keywords they rank for, and also track your rankings, so you know when a competitor overtakes your rankings.
Just because you have stiff competition doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the road for your content. As long as the competition is healthy, you have nothing to worry about. Rather, it is time to monitor your competitors’ strategies using a competitive analysis tool to find what is missing in your SEO strategy.
Up your game by creating engaging content, and most of all, adhering to your SEO strategy. This way, your local competitors will have nothing on you.
Presently, search engine optimization is the most important form of digital marketing. Gaining organic traffic, reputation building and the promotion of your business are goals of website optimization.
Your company’s Website may look great, with plenty of multimedia sizzle. But if the site isn’t consistently attracting targeted visitors and converting them into customers, then it’s not doing its job, and this can negatively affect your revenue.
If you want to make your business visible on the leading search engines and grow traffic for your site, you need an expert to do the job for you. Hiring an SEO consultant is a great investment into the long-term growth of your business, provided you hire the right one. But what do you even look for in an SEO expert?
SEO results highly depend on the strategies of the specialist you hire and their campaigning style. So, while hiring an SEO professional, you need to ask the right questions and consider certain important things.
Your assessment of candidates should focus on the following factors.
Anyone can set up an SEO Agency overnight and call themselves an SEO expert, but that doesn’t mean that they know what they are doing.
There are hundreds of little things that go into the bigger picture of doing SEO and it takes many years of experience to know what works and what doesn’t.
While hiring an SEO professional, you need to make sure that you find yourself an experienced one. Communicate with them well to know their years of experience and success in the field.
The SEO market changes quickly, and an SEO professional has to stay updated with this capricious field. So, while hiring one for your website, you should ask a lot about their years of experience in the business. Their qualifications, success rate, and approach to being up to date with the changing courses of the market should also be subjects to bring up in inaugural conversations.
It’s easy to talk a good game in SEO, but it’s another thing to have happy clients.
When choosing an SEO consultant, look for a track record of producing desirable results for businesses similar to yours. This is the most effective method to check whether the SEO service provider you have contacted is the right one for your website.
If you have chosen an experienced SEO expert, they will be more than happy to share their previous work records and success to establish their competency. A proven SEO consultant should also show how multiple optimizations that they used contributed to the clients’ bottom line.
You can verify their claim by reviewing the previous jobs that they are associated with at the review sites. Check out what their previous clients are saying about them. Thus, you can pick the right SEO professional for your company.
Here at ClickSlice, you will get SEO experts with a proven record of successful SEO work for established and new websites. This is a necessary factor considering the rising number of snake-oil salesmen on the internet these days.
Search Engine Optimization consists of three tiers:
You should make sure that you can get personalized services from the expert and off-page SEO strategies to increase awareness of your content on other websites through social media posts, press releases.
Knowing this, it goes without saying that the expert you hire must be up to date on best practices and the latest trends in SEO. They should have a strong command of SEO toolsets and platforms that facilitate keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink optimization.
Of course, you don’t want a one-dimensional SEO expert. You need someone who will approach their strategy from all three angles to maximize success.
It is better to get yourself an SEO professional who doesn’t promise overnight results. Does the expert focus on conversions – converting a visitor to your site into a customer – or are they more concerned with search engine rankings?
Ideally, Getting ranked on the first page of the search engines is not the goal. Also, high traffic is not the goal. All you need is valuable, relevant traffic that generates leads. But that is not easy.
The focus of any SEO strategy should be to accomplish a relevant goal, with a realistic strategy, like increasing conversions, and not achieving a certain rank. A top-notch SEO expert will carve out a strategy that will set you up to consistently be and remain competitive in the search channel by developing a genuine insight into the product, the users, the revenue model, and the competitive landscape.
One sign of a blue-chip SEO expert? They will always start by asking you lots of questions around the business to inform their thinking on building your online visibility.
When looking for an SEO consultant, you want to hire someone who can come up with ideas, implement them, and measure their impact.
An SEO needs to be comfortable doing relatively geeky analytical and technical stuff day in, day out. The expert will have to crunch through a lot of data and spend time to come up with new ideas and strategies, so they should have a certain sharpness and ability to draw insights.
As Rand Fishkin cites, Finding an SEO who can recite the IP addresses for all of Google’s crawlers is great, but finding one who’s deeply curious and constantly investigating how that crawler works is even better. Ever-growing knowledge is a craveable trait in an SEO Expert you’d want to hire.
There are a lot of self-proclaimed SEO specialists out there, but true experts are few and far between. When hiring an SEO Expert, separating the wheat from the chaff takes time and effort, but finding the right expert to help you grow is well worth the investment.
Thanks to the mentioned factors, you are now aware of hiring methods, skillset, and things to remember about hiring SEO professionals. Give a boost to your business with effective SEO services and drive, not just traffic, valuable traffic from search engines.
You’ve launched your new website, ready to welcome crowds of new customers. But, if no one finds your new website, how will they see what you have to offer? It will take time for your website to become established on the internet and start attracting visitors.
Search engine optimisation has been such an essential topic for site owners for over 20 years. A lot has changed in the world of Search Engine Optimization and there’s currently a lot of SEO tips out there.
Organic traffic is the lifeblood of many websites. To help your site get better search engine rankings and more traffic much sooner, here are some SEO tips, pointedly chosen with new websites in mind.
When you first launch your site, it will have little authority on Google. For high competition keywords, it will rank lower than well-established competitors. Whilst there is nothing to stop you from targeting competitive keywords, it is best to designate less competitive ones. This is the quickest way to generate new traffic for your site.
You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to check how competitive a keyword you would like to use is. This tool will show the competition for the term as high, medium or low. Finding less competitive keywords gives you a higher chance of ranking for them and getting traffic to flow in your site when you are just starting.
Lately, more and more bloggers and content creators are going back to the old method of SEO. This method saw the use of keywords meant to drive search results surpass the absolute qualities of engaging, valuable and user-gratifying content.
Many new websites tend to hold keywords in such high regard that they forget the prime purpose of writing. Search spiders are just scripts. They don’t buy products, they don’t engage with you on social media, and they won’t become a loyal customer.
Don’t prioritize search engines over the actual humans reading your work. Instead, write content for the user, people who have eyes to read and credit cards to purchase your product.
This is another valuable SEO tactic. Try to look at what your competitors are ranking for. Go to one of the tools you use to check out your rankings, but key in a competitor domain. You’ll quickly see what terms are generating traffic for their sites. From there, you can take the best for yourself.
If you don’t know who your competition is, search for some of your most important keyword targets. Take a look at the sites that consistently rank well. Again, don’t try to target a keyword just because a competitor is ranking well for it. Make sure that the keyword is highly relevant to your site and audience.
If well utilised, this is a quick and effective way to use your competitors’ work to uncover audience interests.
Search engines use title tags to determine the subject matter of each page or post on your website. Also, the title tag is one of the first things users see on your site.
The title tag is displayed as the blue link in search results. It is also the main heading when a page is shared on social media. You can make your title tags better by:
Go through all your pages and look at your titles. Are you making the most of your keywords? And are they as interesting and suitable as possible? If not, you need to change your approach towards title tags as this will increase your traffic.
When creating new pages, making your URLs short, readable and keyword-rich is a simple way to make the most of them. If users can’t read or understand your URL, then search engines may be confused as well.
Granted, the URL may be long, but as long as it’s easy to understand for both users and search engines, you are good to go. There are a few guiding principles, such as using hyphens instead of underscores and adding your primary keyword especially in the first few words. If possible, keeping them short and simple while reflecting site hierarchy is best.
One common mistake is using auto-generated URLs. These will work perfectly fine technically, but considering your audience, you should go for something more descriptive. Just as is the case with title tags, the reader wants to have an idea of what’s on the page just by reading the URL.
Look at the content you have for your page. Does it fully cover the topic in question? Does it address all the relevant keyword variations you can find? Does it address common audience questions? Is it engaging?
Search engines love quality content, so you need to make your page as good as possible each time. Look at who is ranking well for your target keywords. How can you create a resource that is much better?
Search engines promote websites that are updated regularly with new or refreshed content. If you’ve got a new website, you won’t have anything that needs updating straight away but it can be a big help, SEO-wise, to add new content regularly.
If you have just set up a new website, hopefully, the tips given in this post will have shown you some of the ways to get your site a perfect start in search engines. Your website should start ranking in search engine results and above all, get clicked by searchers.
While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rolling out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search, and that is Keyword strategy.
While the need to develop a keyword strategy has stayed the same, how you do it hasn’t. Finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines intending to use that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization, is all that keyword strategies entail.
A modern SEO keyword strategy must focus on intent and how valuable they are to your business. Here are some tips to help you devise and execute a functional keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you care about.
To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You can come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important and admissible to your content.
If you’re a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they’re the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas. What types of topics would your target audience search for? Those are the topics that you’d want your business to get found for.
Using the topics noted in the first step, you will need to get keywords. This requires a little research. You need to step inside the shoes of the potential customer of your product or service. How would you find solutions to your problem? What would you search for in your search engine?
One of the best ways to find fitting keywords is by using Google Suggest. To do this just start typing a keyword into Google’s search field, and it will populate a list of suggestions. These usually make great keywords for SEO because they come straight from Google.
This means you know for sure that people are searching for them. Plus, longer keywords, known as long-tail keywords, tend to be less competitive than “short tail” terms.
For example:
– SEO – is a single word search phrase.
– Ecommerce SEO Services is 2-3 word search phrase.
– SEO Services Company in London is a long-tail keyword.
Type in different keywords until you have an extensive list of other keywords. If you want to check out the search volume and competition levels for those terms, you can use a keyword tool such as Ubersuggest.
You cannot just choose keywords and expect your content to rank for them, you must curate keywords for:
Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the readers’ needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?
Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can in terms of keywords to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, informative content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks.
You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. Kind of like setting up shop in a ghost town.
So you have already found a handful of keywords. Now it’s time to see who already ranks for those keywords. To do that, just type one of the words that you found into Google.
Scan the top ten results and jot down any patterns that you notice. For example, you may notice that the first page results are predominantly frequented by list posts. If you wanted to cover that topic on your site, you’d probably want to publish a list post.
This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it’s a great way to fill out those keyword lists.
If you’re struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google’s results, you’ll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.
Keyword research and SEO tools such as SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you put forward more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.
SEO tools also work to your advantage if you’d like to find how competitive your keywords are.
You already have your keywords. Now it’s time to create some super high-quality content. Sometimes you want to forge something bigger and better than what’s out there but other times it’s better to create something different from what’s there. The key here is to use your marketing spidey sense and create engaging content that is valuable to your target market.
Valuable content includes content that answers the questions that your buyers have, provides them with insights they can use and educates them so they can be better at what they do. The right keyword strategy helps your content stand out. Your aim should always be to create something that’s simply better than what’s already ranking on the first page of Google?
Bonus Tip: Be sure you don’t overlook your pages’ URLs because they’re important for your SEO. This is where your keyword research comes in handy. Using the most common and most searched appropriate keywords in your URL is a sure way of generating traffic for your site. If you are not conversant with keyword strategies, you can seek SEO training and courses created and delivered by Clickslice. These will come in handy in handling all your SEO problems.
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