5 reasons why your current SEO strategy is failing
Here are the reasons why your SEO strategy is failing!
Page 2 of Google is a no man’s land. It’s like buying a ticket to Fiji and finding yourself on the beach or lake of your hometown. Unless your hometown is Fiji… that wasn’t the plan.
In no man’s land, you don’t get any traffic. You don’t get conversions. And you don’t feel good about it.
If investing in an SEO strategy is like setting fire to it, we’re here to help. With online content consumption on the rise, SEO has to make you money.
And not to deprive you of your profits.
Here are 5 reasons why your current SEO strategy is failing.
#1: You don’t use content clusters
The content aggregation strategy has become extremely popular over the years.
Without content clusters, your SEO strategy could fall flat. These groups bring together content based on a particular topic. For example, this article is part of a content group on the theme of SEO. We have a main article accompanied by articles of 1,000 to 1,500 words, all of which link to this article.
The aim is for these articles to lead visitors to our main article, which will then contain numerous CTAs for our offer. This strategy allows you to rank for more keywords (because you have more content for each keyword) while showing search engines that your website visitors like what you have to offer.
When you read this entire article, click on our pillar post and read to the end… the search engines realize that you really like our products.
This helps us rank for these keywords and move our articles up the rankings.
Try to write pillar articles with “smaller” articles on the same subject that all link back to that pillar article. Your keyword rankings should increase and you should see your articles climb to page 1 (fingers crossed!).
#2: You don’t invest in your content
People used to get away with a lot when it came to content. They could publish articles of inferior quality and end up at the top of page 1. But this is becoming increasingly difficult. And we love it! Bad content shouldn’t be ranked because it doesn’t give search engine users a good experience.
Search engines have just one objective: to find the answer to a person’s question. Bad content doesn’t answer that question and leaves the reader looking for more.
This is where high bounce rates come into play, and where search engines consider your content “unworthy” of page 1.
5 million WordPress blogs were published *every day* in the first quarter of 2021. If you think you can get away with mediocre content and then wonder why your SEO strategy is failing, it’s time to think again.
You’ll get what you put into your SEO strategy.
Invest in your content to keep people reading. When they continue to read it, it tells the search engines that other people (with the same search query) would also like to read it.
#3: You use a generalized CTA
If you’re getting traffic but no conversions from your SEO strategy, we can help. The good news is that you’re doing a great job of ranking for your keywords. You’ve gone very far, and the rest is a (semi-) easy solution.
What we need to do is take a look at your call to action:
- Is it too general or specific to the question that led visitors to this article?
- Does it ask people to buy a product unrelated to the article they’re reading?
- Have you tested different offers?
Start testing your CTAs to find out what’s going wrong. Use Harry Dry’s strategy of replacing call-to-actions with call-to-values to ensure that your focus is on the reader (and not your personal gain from conversion):
#4: You can’t see the results yet
Children and SEO strategies are great tests of patience. When it comes to children, we suggest deep breathing. When it comes to referencing, we suggest weekly meetings and deep breathing.
Your SEO strategy may seem costly until it brings you a return on investment, but you need to remember that it’s a long-term strategy.
This is not a paid advertising strategy that can be activated and optimized in a matter of days. SEO takes time. Search engines need to know what question your content answers, and they’ll be more likely to do so once a certain number of people have read it (see below).
If you don’t see results a few weeks after launching your SEO strategy… just wait. Don’t pull the parachute and invest your money in a proven marketing channel. If you’ve been trying to get your SEO strategy off the ground, the time to stop is NOT NOW.
Let your SEO strategy run for at least a few months to make sure it has time to work.
#5: You’re not using your other platforms to gain ground
When you launch paid ads for the first time, the platform (e.g. Facebook) suggests that you give them a test period. During those 7 days, they need about $50 for their algorithm to determine who your audience is.
They need to see who:
- Engage with your publications
- Click on your profile
- Explore your website
This tells the platform who is best suited to receive this paid advertising. You can think of SEO in the same way. If you’re able to drive traffic to your articles on your own, you’re helping the algorithm determine who’s best placed for your search results.
What’s more, you’ll increase your article’s ranking in search results, as search engines notice that people like your content.
If you have an audience (email list, social media, etc.), promote your content to them.
This can only help your SEO strategy (and can be done for free most of the time).
Don’t find yourself in no man’s land
SEO is a tricky part of marketing. This is the part that isn’t always entirely clear, because platforms like Google don’t really seem to know how things are classified. As machine learning and algorithms have taken control of the ranking process, we have to bend to their rules to ensure that our content is prioritized.
And their number-one rule is to give their users a good experience. This comes directly from showing them quality content.
Guess what it might be?
If your SEO strategy fails, don’t give up until you have:
- Tried the content grouping strategy.
- Invest correctly in the quality of your content
tested various CTAs (and transformed them into CTVs) - Given at least a few months to show a return on investment.
- Promote your content on your other marketing channels
SEO can change your business. Make sure you give it a fair chance before abandoning it.
