5 Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Ranking

It’s a competitive world out there in the SERPs, and if your site is not on the first page of Google, you might as well not even exist as far as your potential customers are concerned.

Yes, the second page of Google is a dark and lonely place, which is why you have to ensure that your website never falls so low.

And the best way to do that is to turn to meticulous search engine optimization across the board.

SEO can mean many things, ranging from on-page and off-page SEO, to technical SEO and all the way to the tiniest of errors in your code that make your site un-crawlable, and can jeopardize your brand’s reputation as a whole.

Here to help you climb your way to the top of the relevant search results are the reasons why your website is not ranking well and how you can fix the problem.

How many backlinks do you have?

Let’s start with the SEO tactic that many business owners put on the backburner while they’re tending to their site’s optimization – link building.

Link building is one of the most cumbersome SEO challenges, and for a number of reasons.

What’s more, if you don’t have enough quality links, or if you have backlinks leading back to your site from spammy websites across the web, or even if those backlinks are broken, you could be missing out on a lot of SEO juice or even get penalized by Google.

That’s no way to build your reputation in the online world.

First up, you need to work on the quality of your links, that’s a given.

Research the websites you want to earn a link on thoroughly, make sure they complement your industry and niche, and that they also rank high on Google. Next, work on quantity.

One or two quality backlinks won’t get the job done; you need a lot of links in order to keep feeding the SEO machine.

And of course, when you do manage to earn a backlink, make sure they’re set as do-follow.

Take advantage of mobile optimization

Google is pushing for all websites to become mobile-friendly, so if you want to remain relevant in the months and years to follow, you need to optimize your site for all handheld devices and their respective screen sizes and resolutions.

Remember, people are no longer browsing the web on their computers back home, nowadays they’re consuming online content on the go and even shopping on mobile devices – which is your opportunity to rank higher and drive your lead generation forward.

You can do this by taking advantage of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) which are essentially HTML codes that are designed to be ultra-lightweight and carry only the essential information to the device in order to ensure fast loading times and stellar responsiveness on handheld and stationary devices.

Make your site mobile-friendly, and watch as Google starts prioritizing you over the competition – because all of a sudden, you’re relevant to a rising demographic.

Find and fix all pages on your site

This is one of those crucial SEO elements you simply can’t ignore and need to stay on top of in order to prevent getting penalized and sent down the SERP ladder.

Simply put, every page on your website can become “broken” in some way, whether it’s completely unable to load or if the on-page SEO is subpar.

This is why it’s important to find all pages on a website quickly and make the necessary repairs and improvements in order to maintain and elevate your brand’s standing in the online realm.

By scrutinizing every single page on your site and fixing the smaller and bigger issues, you will effectively improve your site’s relevance in the eyes of your audience as well as Google, and you will minimize your bounce rate.

This will, in turn, signal all relevant search engines that the visitors are staying on your site and interacting with it, and that you clearly have something of true value to offer.

Optimize content for search engines

There can be no talk about SEO without mentioning content optimization. As you probably already know, quality content is your gateway to a global audience, as well as a higher position in the relevant SERPs.

The better the content, the more engagement it will have, and more it will get shared across the web.

But when it comes to appearing higher in the result pages, you also have to integrate the relevant keywords, optimize title tags, create short URLs, and structure your content properly so that it appeals to Google and its counterparts.

If you are trying to rank a shopify store on Google, one of the quickest ways to properly optomise your pages, products and content would be to use a shopify SEO plugin like Optizen, which provides all of the tools and features you need to make yor pages really stand out in Google’s eyes. 

Optimize your site’s loading speed

Lastly, be sure to test your site’s loading speed. The time it takes for your site to load might not directly influence your ranking, but the longer your visitors have to wait, the higher the chances that they will abandon you for good.

They will venture off into the warm embrace of your competitors, while sending a clear message to Google that your site is not relevant to them.

Don’t allow this to happen, but instead optimize all visual content, minimize the number of HTTP requests, enable browser caching, and check your hosting plan to ensure your provider is not holding you back.

Wrapping up

If your website is not ranking in the first page of Google, chances are that you’re losing out on a lot of business and jeopardizing your brand’s future as a whole.

Use these insights to discover and fix the problems that might be preventing you from climbing the SEO ladder.