Leap Online Marketing Shares 5 Reasons Your Website is Not Ranking Well

April 29, 2016 - Search engines look at a number of factors when evaluating how to rank your website. Leap Online Marketing specializes in website design and search engine optimization. Here are five important aspects to cover to ensure your website ranks well.

1. Content - Search engines "read" every page of your website to determine what services/products you provide, making quality content on your website is crucial. Your homepage should include brief service descriptions including important keywords that describe what you do. Quality content has also given rise to news and blog sections on websites as it allows business owners to keep posting anew quality content about their business, positioning themselves as an industry expert not only to their potential customers but also to search engines.

2. Tags & Descriptions - There are a few areas of your content that are more important to search engines than others. These are: title tags, page tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions and alt tags. This are basic essentials that your website should have, and some are more important than others for your website to rank (H1 tags and alt tags for instance). The tags and descriptions should take into consideration the keywords you are targeting with your content for each page and be based on that. Google has rules for how long they should be and how they should be written, so consider hiring an SEO company to do this work for you – it's worth the time and investment.

3. Responsiveness/Mobile - Recently, Google rolled out a new algorithm affecting the way they rank your website on mobile searches. Their exact wording is: "…we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices."
mobile website

What this means is that if you don't have a mobile- friendly website it can become very hard to find your site for mobile users. Click this link to test if your website is mobile friendly. If your website fails the test it may be an older website that was not built to be responsive or website friendly. So does this mean that if your site isn't mobile friendly, it's time for a redesign? No, but also yes.

There are interim solutions that a capable website design company can install at reasonable cost. But take this algorithm update as a warning that Google will be looking closer at how your website performs on mobile devices. With mobile searches quickly taking over desktop searches, it's obvious that this will continue to be important. The next requirement will likely be that your website is responsive or that your mobile website is highly functional so you may want to start planning and budgeting for a redesign soon (See How Much Does a Website Cost).

4. Doorway Pages
For website owners experienced with SEO and Google's algorithm changes, you may have noticed that tactics that have worked a long time are now working against you. This is the case with doorway pages, which are website pages built without adding specific value to the website and are connected to optimized domains. To find out if landing pages developed for SEO purposes fall into this category, Google looks at this criteria:

Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site's user experience?

Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?

Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?

Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?

Do these pages exist as an "island?" Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?

5. Quality Links
With the Panda and Penguin algorithm rollout came the attack of link building – a longtime favorite of SEO experts. A lot of shady business was done on this front with link farms and fake directories being setup left and right. This came back to haunt website owners with the Penguin & Panda rollout. However, that doesn't mean that Google doesn't look at links to your website – they just now look at the quality of the link. Is it from a relevant website? Is the link from a news source or an industry related blog or directory? Those are the kind of links you want. These take time and effort to build and start with great content, leading back to where we started: good content should be the cornerstone of your SEO strategy.

About the Author
Evy Hanson has more than 15 years' experience in marketing, including corporate marketing and extensive agency experience. With the goal of helping small/medium businesses transition into the online marketing realm, in 2011 she found her niche and started her own agency – Leap Online Marketing, with clients all over the United States. For more information please visit leaponlinemarketing.com.