It’s a good thing to have a top ranking position in search engines like Google and Bing, However, achieving that can be quite hard and tricky. Many online marketers miss out on the sustainable and substantial growth, because they ignore some important SEO factors. You may think that you have implemented common SEO rules, but it appears that you have no or minimal growth. That is an indication there could be a problem.
Why Basic SEO Rules Don’t Always Work?
There are many external factors (like search results layout) affect the top position in ranking. You do not need to worry much about those factors as you can’t influence them. There are some basic SEO concepts which you should focus and if there are no results, then you may be doing one of the following mistakes:
- Focusing too much on keywords
- Your content isn’t so original
- You ignored meta descriptions
Let us discuss all these three points in detail.
1. Too Much of Focus on Keywords
It is possible that you focus too much on keywords and don’t know whether your products are really beneficial to customers. Keywords are essential because they allow people to find your website, but you need to make sure that you provide values and solutions to problems. It will be a mistake to focus only on keywords and you don’t provide solutions.
When people reach your landing pages, it is important to convince that their lives will be so much better after they purchase your products or use your services. At this point, it is all about writing “Helpful Content” addressing user’s need instead of keyword(s) stuffing.
2. Your Content Isn’t So Original
Content is king and it’s something that people sought after. Your content cannot be an exact copy of existing content or rewritten from other sources using AI or cheap freelance writers. You can find the same or similar piece of information in hundreds of articles out there.
Google and other search engines may not give you a duplicate content penalty for that, but you may leave people disinterested when they reach your website. You should turn your website into a hub of unique and valuable information. This is the only way to ensure people to keep coming back and you will earn organic backlinks.
3. You Ignore Meta Descriptions
It is often said that you should no longer focus meta descriptions as Google almost stopped showing it in search results. But ignoring the meta descriptions completely on your site can be a real problem as most social platforms and directories still show the summary from your meta description. So, it is important to ensure that the webpage title and meta description are unique and relevant. If you implement it, these details should go a long way toward making your webpages more discoverable.
Sometimes people also confuse meta keywords and meta description. Search engines no more use meta keywords but still use meta description if it is relevant to the content. Note that providing information in meta description different than the content for ranking purpose will actually hurt the ranking instead of improvement.
Conclusion
Website owners worry much about many other factors affecting the search engine ranking. As mentioned, you can only control some of these factors and many other factors are not in your hands. It is better to focus on the optimizations under your control like keywords, use of meta descriptions and unique content. All other factors like backlinks will automatically get generated over the period of time.
