There’s nothing more stressful than when you can’t get your website to rank. Well, there are plenty more stressful things, but if your website is one of your main sources of income, you probably want it to rank in search engines. 

If you’re tying yourself up in knots trying to figure out exactly why your website isn’t ranking, I’ve got you covered. Most of the time, it isn’t just one thing that is limiting your chances of success in search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead, several factors come into play.

In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the most common reasons why your website just can’t seem to rank (and break them down into key categories as well):

Content & Keywords

Content and keywords make up a major component of what’s known as on-page SEO, and some of the common culprits in this category include:

• Low Quality Content – Content that is too thin, unhelpful, completely written by AI or plagiarised is highly unlikely to rank. The content on your website needs to be written for the user and provide genuine value.

• Outdated Content – Search engines always look for websites that are constantly updating and evolving. So, you might not be ranking because you aren’t regularly updating your content.

• Keyword Stuffing – This is a thing of the past, and you should also be aware of poor keyword targeting as well. You shouldn’t be targeting exclusively highly competitive keywords; there should be a balance.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the other major component of on-page SEO, and several areas may impact your rankings:

• Slow Page Speed – If your website takes too long to load, users are more likely to bounce. Neither search engines nor users will usually tolerate sites that take too long to load.

• Security Issues – Security is a major consideration for all types of websites (even ones that don’t take payments). So, your rankings may be impacted if you don’t have an SSL certificate.

• Indexing Issues – If search engines can’t find or understand the pages on your website, they aren’t going to index and display them in SERPs.

• Poor User Experience – Indicators like high bounce rates, low engagement and more send signals to search engines that users aren’t finding what they are looking for on your website. This can have a major impact on your rankings.

Off-Page SEO

Now that we’ve covered the major components of on-page SEO, let’s look at some of the common off-page SEO-related issues:

• Poor Backlink Profile – Backlinks are when other websites post a link to your website. If you don’t have enough backlinks or they are low-quality, this could be a reason you aren’t ranking highly.

• No Local SEO – If you haven’t put together your local business profile, like Google Business Profile, for example, or your local optimisation for searches is poor, this could be another reason you aren’t ranking.

The nine common reasons listed here are just the tip of the iceberg, and any number of reasons can cause poor rankings. If you need an expert to take a look at your website and clean things up, reach out (I’ll bring my broom 🧹).