11 Reasons Why Your SEO Isn’t Working

This post will look at all the main reasons why Your SEO might not work. Whether it is the inability to develop the website technically, on-page settings, harmful content, or the overall strategy, if it doesn’t work, you need to find out why.

Whether you’re working with an agency or doing the optimization work yourself, I’ll try to provide meaningful feedback on why it might not be working and what you can do to change it.

1. Realistic expectations

The so-called search is a highly competitive field in many business areas. If you’ve tried to Google basic terms, your monitor is full of competing ads. All the big, well-known brands are in the organic results. Such as the Heureka price comparator, large retail chains, or product manufacturers directly. Then it will be a tough fight.

It is a battle if we add to this that more well-known stores or brands have a better click-through rate because people perceive them for a long time and tend to trust them more than new ones. 

Expectations must be realistic from the outset. Often, if you are a new or relatively small “advertiser”, you will have to balance on the very edges of online marketing possibilities. For example, look at paid advertising options in areas that are key for you and will bring you the first profit you can use to develop your business further.

SEO is more about content creation, analytics and on-page settings for a new project that is less than a year old. Focus on areas that make sense for you to grow and give your customers a reason to choose you over your larger or older competitor.

Build authority, register your brand, offer quality services and get quality references. Gradually get traffic to long-tail keywords, and eventually, it will come to more significant games.

2. Poorly done SEO

Unfortunately, most of the “cheap” SEO is sold as if right on the street. It is cheap, very inefficient and unsustainable. Alternatively, you can buy SEO for 100-200 euros on micro-work portals, which in the end is not even SEO, but just some set of on-page recommendations.

Quality SEO cannot be done quickly and entirely cheaply.

However, you can be sure that many small SEO firms and freelancers are still trying to outwit the hundreds of Google data miners and analysts who – ironically – they don’t think are very smart.

You do not see the promised results if you work with an SEO company. You do not have the opportunity to see what they do, or even if you know what they do. 

Still, it is not sufficiently explained to you, and it is necessary to ask questions urgently and, like with a doctor, consider the opinion of another specialist.

Some warning signs:

• You don’t know what has been done
• No strategic guidelines or measurement
• No noticeable improvement in results
• Initial modification and sudden fall
• No recommendations from web analytics and UX
• No or poor monthly reports and information about other options

SEO is often considered dark art or a highly complex endeavour. Although in reality, it should mainly be about common sense.

If you are concerned about what your SEO agency is doing and have found yourself in one of the points mentioned earlier 

3. Follow Google recommendations, but don’t chase the algorithm

It’s wise to keep up with what’s happening in search if you want to understand what Google is doing and what we’re up to. We also want to keep up with best practices. But obsessing too much about the minor details leads to a lack and waste of time for real marketing and the essential things.

This is one of the things that Google has been working on recently to make information more transparent. For example, many months before the update that favoured mobile sites, Google recommended that web admins switch to responsive web design. This is smart because it’s better for the user, which matters. So it’s better to follow Google’s recommendations rather than trying to figure out what exactly is going on behind the scenes.

It’s nice to follow trends and professional discussions, but don’t become a slave to them. Focus instead on good marketing. Keep up with best practices; design, content, technical and quality guidelines – and you’ll be on top in most cases.

4. Underestimated budget

For example, do you want to start an online bookstore with a budget of 500 euros per month for SEO and general marketing? It can be a bit of a problem. In 2013, the Amazon brand celebrated 20 years and $17 billion in annual sales—and it was still in the red, losing $41 million. However, investors believe in Amazon, and even in 2013, the price of their shares was astronomical. When Amazon finally reported a profit in 2015, the stock rose even more.

It follows that:

• Amazon took the long route and calculated that it would not be profitable in the first month, so it adjusted its strategy accordingly.
• They have acquired and convinced investors that what they are doing makes sense in the long term.

Of course, I didn’t mean to say that starting an online bookstore is impossible, but you need to specialize in an area, and your store will have to find a reason to exist.

You can use your size to your advantage, but you must be flexible and specialized. Even in the local market, there is already competition in every area. Be realistic and consider how and where to allocate your budget to get the most bang for your buck.

5. “Cripple” optimization

Whether you’ve failed to properly optimize your pages for the language used by your target audience or you’ve gone crazy and peppered every page with keywords, not getting your optimization right from the ground up will harm your campaign. Every week I see at least one page with the title “home” – don’t be one of those hoping for an easy win by buying some links…

Basic on-page optimization is not that difficult, and you need to know what to do correctly.

For example, suppose you want to naturally show people what your page, service or product is about in the search results. You must correctly set the basic metadata (meta title and meta description), the so-called snippets. An increased click-through rate will also show their correctness. For example, this is one of the areas where having a perfect foundation pays off and will put you on the path you want to go down.

6. Re-optimized page

Have you ever visited a website that seemed out of place? Keyword lists tucked away in the 

footer? Pages that are broadly similar except for a few keywords? Nonsense blog articles that no one reads? Links exchanged?

Too much SEO effort can negatively affect your website. Over-optimization involves making too many SEO tweaks (often all at once), leading Google to wonder why suddenly so many weird changes are happening to your website simultaneously.

Lately, the crawler and a slightly more experienced user will notice the signs of an “overoptimized website”. So it would be best if you mainly focused on the following:

• Internal links & anchor texts
• Links leading from the page & anchor texts
• Links to the site & anchor texts
• Page titles and meta descriptions
• Preoptimized text
• Keywords in the footer and sidebar
• Irregular and bumpy link building
• Link quality and quantity

The Google algorithm looks for low-quality characters and over-optimized pages to ensure that the site is focused on quality and is for real visitors, not just a Google bot.

7. Technical problems on the website

The search engine has one single goal – to connect search results (in our case Google) with quality content that describes the search query. Once again – high-quality. That is the critical factor.

If Google offered us results that were not interesting to us, of course, no one would use them. So, Google they are trying.

The search engine crawls your site and tries to understand and categorize the content it has found. If everything is in order, the content is unique and of high quality, there are no technical problems on the page, and the on-page principles are correctly applied. The subsequent off-page part of SEO can also be devoted. However, if the search engine finds problems, these harm the overall ranking of the website by the search engine.

Standard website technical issues we encounter:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Domain/subdomain issues
• Duplicate content
• Responsiveness issues
• Code validity
• Use of blocking factors
• Page loading speed

There are many more technical challenges, which cannot all be fit into this article and for which separate books have been written. However, Google Search Console can reveal a lot about your website’s problems. A comprehensive SEO audit is also considered, and you can consult with agencies that can provide SEO audit services.

8. Your SEO agency is not an SEO agency

SEO and online marketing services are offered by many companies that don’t even deal with them at all. They are usually traditional marketing, web designers and programming companies that try to provide the client with everything under one roof. Still, they only buy these services and are often guided only by the price. Many times they cannot evaluate SEO themselves. Sometimes, unfortunately, the client only finds out after some time.

9. You don’t have quality links

So you already have a great site, you’ve set up on-page SEO, you have great content, you’ve even made manual company entries in the relevant catalogues, you’re following best practices, and you’re monitoring everything. In the end, though, it still comes down to links.

Links that’s the voice of the internet. Good connections will bring relevant traffic, help build your website’s authority, and move you higher in search results.

Links should be from relevant, up-to-date and topically oriented sources. There are several tools for evaluating the quality of a link on the technical side, but you should also not forget the “feeling” of the connection and its spam score.

There are a whole host of link-building techniques, but the general rule is that you should provide something of value to make people want to link to you or do something that will prompt people to talk about you.

10. You don’t have high-quality and relevant content

Modern SEO is mainly about high-quality and engaging content, which is conceptually written on the web and for which new backlinks are gradually obtained. As part of SEO and content marketing activities, it is necessary to regularly create new content according to user personas and the editorial calendar.

The content does not have to include only the written text but also include the following:

• Videos
• Presentations
• Infographics
• E-books
• The so-called white sheets of White papers

Along with links, this is where most companies lose out – but let’s not overcomplicate it.

Do your research. Find out what content is helpful to your audience and find existing content you can do better. When you create new content, let your customers know about it and show sites that link to old and weaker content that you are a more useful source of information for them and their users.

11. You are not patient enough

This is doubly true in SEO. But since you’ve even read this article, you probably still have some patience.

With optimization, the results appear gradually, and it’s a long shot. Website optimization is a process that needs to be done continuously, not in spurts: now I pay some agency, and if there are no results in 4 months, I stop optimizing and maybe come back to it in a year when I make money.

Getting a website from positions 50 to 20 in the SERP can be relatively quick, but getting from positions 3 to 20 is often complex and long-term. This is where another area comes into play, namely how to improve the click-through rate, which can bring you more visits than, for example, a competitor in a better position.

SEO needs to realize what period you are looking at in terms of investment of time and money. How much will optimization cost you? For example, over one year (the minimum in this field, in my opinion) and what it will probably bring you in financial terms. Organic revenue can also be measured in Google Analytics.

Make sure you know how to evaluate the progress of your efforts to avoid disappointment and realize what business benefits the whole process brings you.

Conclusion

The past five years in online marketing have shown me that organic traffic from search engines gets results. Many studies show that in financial terms, on-page optimization is the most cost-effective online sales channel in the long run. It follows that SEO is still absolutely as important as ever.

Don’t forget to set KPIs to track progress and set business goals based on the current situation. Equally important is setting realistic expectations, e.g. how much progress will be made. This needs to be done before we can expect tangible results.

Like any other significant activity, SEO takes time and effort to make it work and produce results. If we do it right, the results will be worth the effort. However, if you are struggling with strategy and measurement or cannot see the results of your campaigns, we would be happy if you could tell us about your ideas. Though it is not proven, some experts say that sometimes enough to make our best graphics cards play a crucial role too.

Also Read : What Is The Key To Online Marketing?