5 Reasons why your Website is not Ranking

Reaching the top of search engine result pages can turn your website into your company’s greatest assets. However, achieving this aim is easier said than done. More often than not, people create high quality website expecting to begin yielding results the following day. They are soon disappointed to discover that none of their pages are ranking anywhere on the first page for their chosen keywords. Here are a few reasons why your website may not be ranking;

1. Your website is still new

This is tends to be the first reason why websites may not be ranking as high as their owners would like them to. Here is a simple fact of life as far as Search Engine Optimization is concerned; no matter what you may hear out there, SEO is mostly about time.

Yes, there are websites out there that buck the trend, but, in reality, a website that has been around for 10 years is going to rank higher than one that has been around for ten days.

Indeed, there are people out there who bought domains long back and kept them unused for some time. When they finally launched their sites, they discovered that these sites with older domains were ranking higher than those whose domains had just been created.

So, the reason why your website is not ranking may not be because you have been doing things wrong. Fact of the matter is, your company website simply needs to be around for some time in order for you to begin bearing the fruits of your efforts.

2. You have not carried out proper keyword research

Most people simply get the inspiration to begin blogging, and they write about this and that without ever bothering to carry out keyword research. This may be the reason why your website has not been ranking as well as you may wish it.

Keyword research is important if you are going to produce content, both blog posts and videos, that people will want to consume. Without it, you are just stabbing  in the dark. True, you may encounter success along the way. However, it is much more likely that your efforts will fall by the wayside.

There are various Keyword Research tools out there. The most used of these is Google’s Keyword Planner. You can also use Google’s suggestion feature to determine the keywords that people have been using in their queries.

3. Your Have Not SE Optimized your site

Search engine optimization is all about getting everything right in terms of the technical and non technical aspects of your website are concerned. It is not limited to aesthetics; you may have a great looking website that hardly gets visitors. Here are a few technical SEO aspects that may negatively affect your site’s ranking;

• You do not have backlinks
• You do not have internal links
• There is duplicate content on your site
• You have not written any meaningful articles.
• Your pages are competing for the same keywords
• There is no blog on your site.

4. You have been penalized by Google

This would be the case if  your site had previously been ranking well, only to fall by the wayside at some point. The important thing to do is to check whether or not you have been penalized by Google. If you have not added your site to Search Console, do so. It does a great job of keeping you notified about errors on your site.

5. There is too much competition for your chosen keywords

When we started this blog, we wanted to rank for web hosting keywords. This is where much of the money is, as far affiliate marketing is concerned. However, it soon became clear that we were never going to rank well for the relevant keywords because, well, there were people who had been optimizing for the same keywords for over 15 years.

So, in spite of the fact that we have great articles reviewing various web hosts on this blog, out articles hardly ever get read. There is just too much competition. This may be another of the reasons why your website is not ranking. You should, therefore, target keywords that are not that competitive, which should give your site the boost that you are looking for.