Why SEO Fails

If you are sitting and wondering why your SEO strategy isn’t taking off as you planned, you aren’t alone, with 260 people searching for ‘why SEO fails’ each month. Continue reading to find out more about SEO and why your efforts may not be helping your rankings.

What is an SEO strategy??

An SEO strategy is a meticulously crafted plan designed to boost your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs). By enhancing content visibility, you can attract more organic traffic to your site. Effective SEO strategies employ a range of techniques, including on-page optimization, local SEO, technical SEO, and content marketing. You can read more about SEO and different aspects of strategy in our blog.

How long does SEO take to work

Semrush states that it takes anything from 4 months to a year for SEO to ‘work’ – this means that your SEO efforts are working to rank your site higher in the SERPs and you are getting more traffic to these pages as a result. SEO can be the long game as Google and other search engines have a lot of things to consider as well as hundreds of thousands of pages to account for.

Reasons why your SEO might be failing

You’re trying to target the wrong keywords

Part of SEO is user intent, and we usually divide user intent into several categories, these are:

Intent Meaning
Navigational Users are looking for a particular page like a login page
Informational Users want to learn more about a topic
Transactional Users want to do a specific action such as purchase something
Commercial Users want to complete some research before making a decision e.g. Searching for the best digital pr company in Sutton Coldfield.

If you are trying to ‘buy a pair of Nike trainers’ (a transactional search) you aren’t going to want to see a video about ‘how are Nike trainers are made’ (an informational search). You might be targeting the wrong keywords if you are seeing search results that don’t match what you are trying to achieve with your SEO efforts.

Always put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience and think about what they would search for – it might not always be the exact wording you would use. If your industry is more complex or technical, such as legal, then you may need to think of simpler terms rather than the actual term as your prospective clients may not be familiar with the correct wording. Contentious probate, for example, is the legal term for contesting a will.

As you can see in the table above, more people are searching for contesting a will than contentious probate as this is the more common term and what you should be focusing your efforts on.

Your user experience isn’t very good

If you’re measuring your SEO success against key performance indicators (KPIs) such as people completing a conversion action on your site, you may not have considered the impact user experience will have on SEO results. In our ‘Things to consider for your SEO strategy’ blog series we discussed how important a user-friendly website can impact your SEO.

When visiting your webpage, potential clients will want the website to load fast, be easy to use & navigate and generally be pleasing to look at. Google considers user experience to determine ranking, so your website could have the most informative content but would struggle to rank first if users find it difficult to use.

You aren’t getting quality backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites that direct users to your site. They play a critical role in SEO, as search engines can use them to assess your website’s credibility and authority (sometimes referred to as EEAT). Low quality backlinks come from spammy sites or those from link farms.

Buying links is considered a ‘black hat’ SEO tactic. Ahrefs mentions that Google will not only discount the links but can also penalise you by completely removing your site from their SERPs! The best way to acquire back links is to produce great quality, meaningful content that is useful for the reader and utilise digital PR tactics.

These may include:

  • Unlinked Mentions
  • Guest Posts
  • Press Releases
  • Influencer Marketing

You aren’t effectively tracking your website

Without accurately tracking your website and its presence, how will you know your SEO efforts are effective?

Using free tools such as Google Analytics & Google Search console allows marketers to view website traffic, analyse what sources it’s coming from and understand what users are doing when they arrive. You should be using both Google tools to monitor your website and asses where to focus your SEO campaign, before measuring the effectiveness of them.

Paid tools can also be used to monitor things like where you are ranking for the keywords you have optimised or how difficult they may be to rank for.

You’re giving up too soon

SEO is the long game; it is not one for quick results. If you want immediate leads and traffic, you need to put your money where your mouth is and invest in things like paid Social Media or Google Ads.

As previously stated, it can be anything from four months to a year before you see results from your SEO efforts, so it’s important to be patient. When you’ve worked on optimising a particular blog or webpage for a keyword, you should ideally leave it for 3-6 months before assessing whether your SEO is a success or a fail.

You can measure your SEO by looking at Google analytics and comparing the most recent month to six months earlier. For example, I would look at my June traffic compared to my January traffic. You can see what keywords people are using to access your site by looking at queries in search console.

Still struggling to get to grips with SEO?

Developing an effective SEO strategy involves an in-depth understanding of algorithms, search engines and the use of several tools to get results. Patience is also crucial, as SEO is a long-term investment to gain any noticeable results.

For more insights and a detailed strategy for improving your SEO, explore our blog and discover how WorkPR can enhance your online presence by getting in touch today.