When you have a website up and running for at least a few months, you may have already received emails from numerous companies proposing that they do your SEO for you to help you rank better. Whether you take on these offers, have your own in-house SEO team, or are doing the optimizing yourself, the strategies that are used are what dictate the outcome. Sometimes however, the strategies that are being used do not work as well as you expect them to.
Not ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs) may discourage anyone from continuing with their current strategy. It may even put them off of having their site optimized at all. What may not be apparent is that, when you don’t see your site ranking well or you are not getting the traffic you expect it to get, this does not mean you should stop optimizing your site. It just means that you need to tweak your strategy in order to find that sweet spot that gets you the rank and revenues that you are aiming for.
What Could Be Going Wrong
Some people are quick to blame whoever is doing their SEO for the failure to get the ranks and traffic that they are expecting. What they do not realize is that there are quite a few factors involved in getting a site to rank well and to start earning online. Here are some of the possible reasons why your current optimization strategy is not effective for your site:
- Your goals, budget and timeframe are not realistic – in order for you to get the results you want for your site, you need to understand that there are some things that even the best SEOs in the world will not guarantee. For example, if you are asking for first page and first place rank in two months on a budget of $200 and you expect the site to stay in that top spot for a year, you have your head in the clouds. The minimum amount of time for a new site to rank well on any of the search engines is around 6 months, and even then, first two pages is usually the most any decent SEO would promise. Also, this will come with a rather hefty price tag since getting sites to rank these days involves a lot of hard work, particularly if you want your site to stay on the first page for as long as your site is active.
- You have a very competitive niche – if you are in a niche that has quite a lot of competitors, you should be aware that getting that number one spot will be a competition between you and the rest of your competitors. If you have 1000 companies using the same keywords, selling the same kinds of things, and optimizing sites at the same time, it may be somewhat difficult to expect top rankings for your site unless if you have a few tricks up your sleeve, like content marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising. Even then, these things need to be planned real well and maintained for a certain amount of time (minimum of 6 months) in order to generate positive results.
- You are not focusing on your target audience – before you can expect people to come to your site, you first need to understand who your target audience is and build a campaign with them in mind. Creating content simply for the sake of creating content won’t help you get the traffic and the revenues you need. You should concentrate on giving your target audience the kind of site they need, want, and can easily use. That way, they will not only visit your site, but also recommend you to others because of how helpful you were to them and what they needed.
