5 Reasons Why You’re Not Ranking (Even If You’re Building Links)

If you’re building links, you should welcome more organic traffic.

If this isn’t the case, it means you’re losing visitors and revenue.      

Don’t worry, though.

In this post, let’s look into why this is happening.

1. Terrible content

“Content is king”, goes the popular saying. Content marketing is still one of the top guns if you want to succeed online.

So even if you generate lots of links to your page, it won’t rank if your content sucks. If your web visitors are passionate readers, your content has to be appealing.

It needs to discuss fabulous topics. Otherwise, they’ll get bored. And off to another website they go.

Put yourself in their shoes. Would you be willing to spend your time reading checking out something that doesn’t interest you?

No, you won’t. This is especially true if you value your time well.

So what can you do to make content rank #1 on Google?

• Design for good user experience - Create content for your audience. Make them happy. Educate and entertain them, too!
• Use long-form content - Brian Dean says the average number of words of the top 10 results is 1,890. And those with more than 1,000 words end up with more shares. This is because readers tend to find more information in this type of content.
• Edit your content to perfection - Spell words correctly and know your grammar.
• Optimize for mobile - Your c
• ontent needs to be attractive on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. After all, about 70% of digital media time goes to mobile devices.

2. Page speed

Did you know that a 100-millisecond load time delay can cause your conversion rates to go down by 7%?

Especially with how fast things are moving in the modern world, delays are a big NO.

Recommended: How to Rank Your Website Effectively With Long-Tail Keywords

So your content may be excellent. But if your site takes forever to load, you can’t count on it to get a high ranking.

With a slow page speed, it’s like you’re living in the past. You won’t end up reducing your bounce rate. You won’t be engaging your visitors, as well.

Here are the different factors that affect page speed:

• Poor choice of hosting - Go with a web host that fits your needs. If you have a huge database and high traffic, don’t opt for shared hosting. Instead, choose cloud-based servers.
• Bad coding - Write clean code. And if possible, place JavaScript on below-the-fold areas.
• Too many plugins - Uninstall unnecessary plugins. Just go with the best one in a category.
• Large image sizes - Images dr
• ive people to your site, indeed. But without an image compressor, these large chunks can negatively impact your site.

3. Undefined keyword strategy

You need to optimize your site for target keywords. Turn your back on the wrong ones, too. And try not to go all over the place with keywords.

It’s counterproductive. And with this approach, Google’s search spiders won’t crawl your page properly.

The result? Google will ignore your site. And your online marketing efforts just went down the drain.

So what you need is a plan. You should acknowledge the interests and pain points of your target audience.

Think of keyword research as the blueprint for your marketing efforts. It’s what you will use as the basis for making the best decisions.

Without it, consider yourself wandering aimlessly.

Targeting long-tail keywords are your best play here. After all, they account for about 70% of web searches.

To go about keyword research, here’s what you need to do:

• Go to the Google Keyword Planner - It’s 100% free.
• Search for your seed keyword - The tool can then provide related terms with suggestions.
• Browse the list of results - You’ll find thousands of related terms. If you want, you can narrow it down.
• Choose those with high search volume and low competition - You’ll find these data on the same page as the list of results.

4. Over-optimization

More than 130 trillion pages. That’s how many pages indexed by Google.

If you want to get Google’s attention, it’s no secret that optimization will do the trick.

Without a doubt, optimizing your site will improve it. If you keep optimizing it, it should mean that your site will keep getting better.

The truth, though, is: no, it won’t.

Optimizing your site is one thing. Over-optimizing it is another.

And overdoing the optimization is never the answer. It does more harm than good.

It prevents your visitors from understanding the real value of your site.

Here are some ways you are over-optimizing your content.

• Keyword stuffing - Avoid using too many and irrelevant keywords. Search engines frown upon it. It gives your content an unnatural vibe, too.
• Keyword-rich anchor texts as internal links - Don’t go with exact URLs as anchors.
• Using many H1s on one page - You can go with as many H2s, H3s, H4s… as you want. But an H1 tag should be one and only.
• Links to low-quality sites - Link
• juice flows however you want it. If you link to high-quality sites, it comes with positive effects. But if you go with low-quality ones, you can expect negative results.

5. Your links suck

About 41% of large companies admit that link building is not their forte. They find it difficult.

But you know what? They do it anyway.

After all, links matter. Links can help make them a power player in online marketing. And that is why many link building procedures exist.

Then again, do you think all links are equal? In this case, you have another thing coming.

Where links are concerned “Quality over quantity” should be your mantra. If you don’t want to over-optimize your site, you need to choose your links wisely.

After all, lots of backlinks aren’t always a good thing. You need to consider the quality of the site you’re acquiring links from.

You should thoroughly assess your link partners. To do that, think about these factors:

• Useful content - Is their content as awesome as your own? Is it customer-centric? It should be!
• Relevance is important - If your site is about “dog grooming”, don’t acquire links from sites about vegetables.
• Easy-to-find text links - If their visitors don’t know where their links are, these people might not get to your own site.  
• Proper category of the main directory page - Otherwise, it would seem like your link partner is a link farm. And search engines are against that.

So how do you find a great link partner?

• Use major web directories - A major benefit of getting inbound links from these places? They help your website get indexed by search engines.
• Find the link partners of your competitors - Identify the sites that are ranking for the same keywords. Then swoop in to form the same link partnerships.
• Go with sites that have explicit exchange requests - Use “intitle:” + “link to us” and other Google search operators for this. The goal is to present yourself to those who are looking for link partners as well.
• Go with sites that have high PageRank - They pas
• s higher credit and help you build a great backlink profile. You can submit guest posts or round-ups.

Conclusion:

Remember, how you will increase website traffic matters. If you go with questionable approaches, your rankings will suffer.

So always play by the rules. Make search engines happy. And soon enough, with the increase in revenue, you’ll also be happy.

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