The truth is, SEO can be difficult to understand. It’s not like other marketing channels, which are relatively simple to understand and easy to use. SEO has a lot of moving parts that need to work together for it to produce results. If any of these components fail, you will notice the effects on your website rankings and traffic levels. In this blog post, we’ll cover 10 reasons why you don’t see SEO results – let’s find out what they are!
Your website is new: It takes time for your website to show up on Google search listings. If you launch a website this morning and expect it to show up on Google a few moments later, you might be in for a shock. Despite the massive number of web-crawlers searching for new content and new websites to index, it takes time for Google to find your website and understand it. And while you can expect this process to be done within a few days, there are times when Google can take weeks to crawl and index your website correctly.
You are blocking search engines from indexing your website: You can ask Google not to show a part or the entirety of your website using the “noindex” metatag. This is useful for showing search engines that certain parts of your website are not meant to be indexed, but it can play a significant role in preventing SEO results from being found. For example, setting the noindex metatag on pages, you wish to keep hidden will ensure they won’t appear as Google search listings. So even if someone enters a query relevant only to these pages, chances are they won’t ever show up as part of any result set. As an alternative to using the “noindex” tag, which keeps content out entirely from being indexed by Search Engines, there’s also another method called ‘Nofollow,’ which prevents specific links from being crawled and passed link juice (this means less ranking ability).
You are blocking search engines from crawling your website: Similar to the “noindex” metatag; most websites have a robots.txt file. This instructs web crawlers where they can and can’t go. If specific URLs are blocked in the robots.txt file, then Google can’t crawl those URLs. This means they can’t index them and show your website in Google search results. You need to open up access for crawling so that web crawlers like Googlebot have free reign on your website – only then will you see SEO results.
You aren’t linking out: On-page optimization isn’t just about having keywords appear multiple times throughout the text of a page. It’s also about giving pages content linked together with other relevant pages within your site or even connected sites (links from others pointing back to yours). This helps both users and Search Engines understand what topics are discussed across different websites and how they are all related through interconnected themes and ideas.
Link building: If you want high rankings for competitive terms, you need links. It’s as simple as that – if your competitors are ranking higher than you on Google, chances are they have more links pointing to their website from other websites and sources online. This is why link building (the process of acquiring quality backlinks) needs to be part of any SEO strategy which aims at achieving high rankings in search results pages.
You don’t track progress: Tracking the performance of an SEO campaign is essential for learning what works well, where there might still be room for improvement, and how far along the road towards success or failure a particular approach has gotten you so far. If you aren’t tracking things like organic traffic levels coming into your website through organic search listings on Google Search Results Pages, then it will be challenging to monitor your SEO progress.
You don’t have a documented strategy: If you are doing all of this on the fly, it’s time to get back to the drawing board. Without any plan or documentation, which helps you set out specific goals and milestones along the way, your SEO activities will be all over the place. Doing so will make it almost impossible for anyone else (not just Search Engines) to understand what your website is about and why you deserve top rankings in search results pages.
You don’t add alt tags: Images are part of any website which includes them – they help make things look more interesting by adding visual appeal, background images can set the scene or mood of certain parts of your site, product photos show others exactly what each item looks like before clicking on it to find out more information about buying options, the list goes on! But how do users know these are even there unless you tell them?
You aren’t keeping content fresh: When you update pages and add new content to your site regularly (ideally once per week or more), it means that Search Engines will always have something new and exciting to index. If your last blog post was published over six months ago, then the chances are high that none of its updates will show up when people do relevant searches through Google – this is because these results only go back so far before they’re refreshed by crawling newly written content.
Google can’t crawl JavaScript-heavy websites: This isn’t just restricted to using JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS; any website which uses JavaScript to render content from a server will be inaccessible to Google’s web crawler. This is why you have to ensure that all of your pages can also be accessed without any scripts being executed by the browser; otherwise, they won’t show up in search results pages either!
SEO is a complicated process that takes patience, strategy, and the right tools. If you’ve been struggling with your search engine optimization efforts in recent months, here are ten reasons why it might be happening. If you don’t know how to solve these issues, you might want to consider working with an SEO agency.
