In the past SEO (search engine optimization) use to be somewhat magical: If you do this, then maybe you’ll get the results you want. Fortunately, Google has made it much clearer today. Now we have certain guidelines to follow to get the website traffic we want. For this Google wants to see your website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. There are four reasons why your website may be lacking in these areas.
Your Website Moves Too Slow on Mobile
Google concerns itself with providing everyone with a great viewing experience. They understand that nobody wants to visit a website that loads slowly on mobile technology so they penalize these websites. To speed up your website here you’ll want to make sure that it’s AMP friendly meaning that your images are properly sized, any unnecessary code is removed, and you don’t use any crazy fonts. These are things that’ll affect your SEO and determine whether Google will send you any website traffic.
Your Content is Poorly Written
When you allow a technical writer to create your website’s content you’ll find that the content is often wordy, dense, difficult to parse, and focuses mainly on sales and features, not on pain points. This type of content is a major reason why you don’t get a lot of website traffic. Simply put, Google hates this type of content. They want to see engaging content that’s clear and concise.
Your content should be written so that someone who isn’t in your industry can understand it. One app that you can use to help you determine your content’s readability is Hemingway. It will tell you the reading level and complexity of the sentences you’ve used in your content. If you want to get good SEO and website traffic you should aim for:
- A ninth-grade reading level
- Few adverbs
- Active voice
- Simple language
You’re Not Producing Enough Content
To be seen as an authority in your field you need to write a lot of content. To show SEO that you’re an authority you need to write and publish something new every month. Fortunately, there are many ways for you to come up with new content and thus increase your website traffic including:
- Answer someone’s question
- Provide information on how to do something
- Offer checklists or cheat sheets
Your Backlink Portfolio Sucks
Backlinks play a major role in SEO today. Google realizes that websites that have a lot of them are authorities in their field and thus will send more website traffic to these sites. However, if you don’t do backlinks correctly you could wind up hurting your SEO.
When you’re building backlinks you should never:
- Buy them
- Trade them non-organically
- Get them from an irrelevant or spammy site
Google will catch and penalize you if you don’t take the time to create backlinks by producing great content. So while you want more links you want to make sure that they’re relevant to your niche.
To improve your backlinks you should first use a tool (e.g. Ahrefs, SpyFu, Majestic) to see what you’re working with. Not only do you want to run your own domain through the tool but you also want to do this for some of your competitors too. If you notice that they have a lot more backlinks than you do, it’s time to get busy employing some of the following strategies:
- Reach out to the school you graduated from and try to get your website published in their alumni pubs
- Subscribe to HARO and respond to some of their queries every day
- Figure out where your competitors have guest blogged and ask if you can guest blog there as well
- Get listed in all the relevant directories
- Produce more great content and links will follow
Conclusion
If you’re still not getting the website traffic you need, don’t panic. You need to work on showing your expertise and trustworthiness. To do this focus on things like how well your website is performing on mobile, your voice, and clarity, producing more content, and building an organic backlink portfolio. All of these things are going to take time so if you need some help make sure you reach out to the Local SEO Company in Tampa, FL.