5 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn't Working

So you've put in the hours to build a stunning website you think people will love, but no one seems to be checking it out. Apart from your mum and a few close friends. Websites are not like the Kevin Costner classic field of dreams, you can't simply build it and they will come. You have to give users and search engines a reason to take note of what you have to say. While you may feel that the internet and Google not giving you your fair share of the spotlight, it's nothing personal. You need to prove your worth if you want to be ranked first.

A combination of auditing sites s and repeating myself senseless when trying to help sites out. I decided it's time tp I've put together the most common mistakes websites are making to ensure they'll get the cold shoulder from organic search. So before you go crying to AdWords and throwing money at the problem, perhaps you need to take a long hard look at your site.

1. You don’t have a target audience

Problem:

Marketing to any and everyone with money is not a real thing. If you're trying to market to everyone you will only succeed at targeting no one. To compound your misery there are other websites in the same space as yours, competing for the same traffic and guess what? To clients who search, ranking higher than you does mean they're better than you are. Nevermind the fact that you're more skilled, provide better after sales service, that you are cheaper or you're a specialist, you simply can't convince users when you're on page 2 or 3.

Solution:

Definite your target market asap. Then split it into niches by area, income, gender etc. Find out what these niches are looking for that you can offer them, what are the keywords they use, what kind of questions they have and attempt to answer them. As you start to dominate your niche you know have a base to work off of and leverage into a bigger audience by winning more niche searches.

2. You don't have a strategy

Problem:

You can spend hours and hours on “marketing” but if you don’t have a strategic plan, you could be wasting valuable time. You can’t just post whatever you feel like on social media or spend hours taking pretty infographics or writing blog posts or creating free downloads if you don't have the end goal mind. What are all these activities trying to achieve, are they bringing me closer to my goals?

Solution:

Define your goals, what do you want to achieve in the next year? If you want to achieve X visits from organic how will you do it? To achieve X you're going to break it down into tasks. Blogging, social media, link building, UX etc. Allocate time to high priority tasks while also roping in quick wins along the way where possible.

3. You don't take action

Problem:

The only thing worse than not having a strategic plan is actually taking time to make a plan and then not taking action. You can research and strategize and plan for months, but if you don’t take action – you fail before you even get started.

Solution:

Break down the targets and tasks you've set out in your strategy and assign time to do them daily to-do lists. Create a marketing calendar in conjunction with a project management tool, so you can have a full overview of tasks. Getting things done will not only improve your site and your marketing but give you a sense of daily accomplishment which will motivate you to do more. So grab your site with both hands, make things happen and most importantly take accountability.

4. You are not consistent

Problem:

I think it's safe to say for close to 99.9999% of people, success doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re not showing up consistently, and try connecting with your audience, to build brand awareness, and to promote your products or service then you’re doing yourself and your business a disservice. Marketing in digital or traditional is all about staying top mind and being the first brand association when users think of a products or services.

Solution:

Scheduling and automation can come in handy here. Creating content well in advanced scheduling them for launch and giving them a boost with email and social media scheduling to increase engagement. Reaching out to your audience regularly and giving them a reason to come back will improve time on site and on site engagement which are positive signs to search engines. Slowly building constant healthy traffic, will show your legitimacy and search engines will take note and give you a bump up in the rankings.

5. You're not paying attention to your analytics

Problem:

If you're not looking at the numbers and basing everything you do on feeling, it can only get you so far. The best way to see what works and what doesn't is to track and monitor your efforts. cThrough a lot of trial and error you can gain valuable insight. Insight that you can use to make corrections and adjustments to what you do, when you do it, how you do it and why you do it in order to drive the best ROI in terms of time and money spend.

Solution:

Make sure you have tracking tools installed on your site, have a look at the numbers from your email platform, your social media dashboards and pull together all these data streams. Secondly, make sure you correctly tracking all your digital marketing efforts to see how different channels are performing and how they work together to improve your SEO. Finally, start extracting insights from your tracking to answer questions like:

• Who is visiting your site
• Where do they normally come from
• How often do they visit
• What are my peak times
• What content are they interested in
• How are they navigating my website

Once you have the answers you can take this back to the strategy phase, take action and be consistent about it. It won't be easy but with this game-plan, you will find that it's not impossible and you can control your sites organic performance.

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Tags: Content Marketing, How to, SEO