Why Your Web Content Does Not Rank Well (And What to Do About It)

Anyone with even a nodding experience of search engine optimization will know that the quality and relevance of web content are perhaps the most important factors in achieving Page 1 rankings.

However, it may happen that even after you have done thorough market research, analyzed the high-traffic pages you want to optimize, and written content that is of top quality with the most relevant keywords infused in it, your rankings do not improve at all.

Such a situation can be exceedingly frustrating because you have done all that had to be done but it did not have any results.

Despite the frustration, the potential of the content can still be realized with a few tweaks once you review some of the most likely reasons why search engines are not ranking your content.

Tweaks to Improve Your Content for Better Search Engine Ranking

Here’s why you content might not be ranking well, and what to do about it.

1. Subject of the Content 

While search engines consider innumerable ranking factors for allotting a webpage a page rank, one of the primary considerations is the subject of the content. You need to establish whether the content provides the answer to questions by users and if it is also useful to a wider audience.

In addition to the relevance, the content also needs to be original, carry authority, and be directly related to the webpage in which it will be hosted. All search engines are very sensitive to content that is duplicated, plagiarized or not relevant to the context and drive such content down the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Long content is no more an issue with search engines, in fact, the more it appears to be original, reliable, and smart, the better the rankings will be.

2. Keyword Usage 

According to publisher monetization platform MonetizeMore, keyword research is the most critical consideration of any inbound marketing strategy. It should be a priority.

A keyword audit will reveal that keywords with very high search volumes can be difficult to rank for simply because they tend to be generic. This underlines the importance of long-tail keywords that are more specific regarding the query and its context.

ReadySetSeo, an SEO marketing specialist in South Australia, adds that since these long-tail keywords represent a later stage of the buying cycle of the customer, they are likely to convert more to actual transactions.

The simplest way of researching long-tail keywords is to feed it into a search engine and observe what predictive text suggestions are thrown up. To take it a step further, you can analyze them using Google’s Keyword Planner or a popular tool like SEMrush.

Once you know which long-tail keywords are performing the best, you can design relevant content with the keywords embedded to attract users with high intent.

3. Website Content Updates

It is evident that search engines reward content relevance and using fresh keywords will help users to discover your website better.

Very similar to dated keywords tending to be increasingly ignored by search engines, when the content is not refreshed the site ranking can decline. You can also lose out the advantage that the age of the domain gives you when your content becomes stale.

Since search engines are obsessed with optimized content that is both relevant, fresh and authoritative, it is important to conduct regular content audits that take a hard look at both the freshness of the content as well as the keywords. By using the topic research tool provided in SEMrush, you can find out what changes have taken place in the framing of the search queries by users, as well as their subjects of interest.

It is also good policy to research your competitors to find out which keywords are driving their queries and what changes have taken place since the last time you studied it.

Remember, the more updated your content is, the better are your chances of countering the emergence of new competitors in the same niche.  

4. Weak Link Profile

Despite a lot of debate on the value of inbound links, SEO experts still believe links continue to be important. It can be very difficult for even truly great content to rank well without an effective link building strategy in place. Even if Google sees strong content and updated keywords, it can still question a high page ranking due to the absence of high-quality inbound links.

The absence of the links tends to make Google think that there is something it has not spotted that is making sites with authority avoid linking to you, hence it does not drive you as high up the rankings as the content deserves.

Inbound links not only deliver more users to your site but also signal that your site is reliable and has authority. Competitive link analysis is a good way of finding out the nature of their domains, their audiences, common factors, differences between their and your link profiles, and essentially what they seem to be doing better than you to be able to earn those valuable links.

Conclusion 

Assuming that you have taken care of SEO technical factors like mobile optimization, page-loading speed, and defective XML sitemaps that can drive users away, focusing on content, keywords, and user concerns can boost your SEO to deliver high page rankings.