Intro
When done correctly SEO can be your most powerful tool to getting the leads, traffic, and sales that your business needs to thrive. Organic search is the foundation of a business marketing strategy. Without it you will struggle. It is critical that you understand what is going on.
If you are reading this article we already know a few things about you: you know what SEO is, you have likely been investing into your efforts but for some reason you are not getting the result you and you were hoping for. We understand this can be highly frustrating. Especially when you are doing the work and the results just don’t show.
Your struggle has led you to question things like “is SEO dead” ”is SEO still relevant” “Why does my SEO not work” Or “I have high impressions and no clicks”
In this article by the Cindtoro team we are going to take you deeper into the world of organic Search and help highlight the 10 reasons why your website does not rank well on Google or other search engines.
1. You Are Targeting the Wrong Keywords
There is a reason why we chose to put keywords first. A search query is how Google finds and indexes content on the web. By targeting the wrong keywords you are making things difficult for Google to understand what your webpage is about.
Targeting ill relevant terms means low search volume and low traffic. This normally happens because you have failed to do proper keyword research or you do not understand who your target audience is. Essentially you are just creating content just because with no real strategy behind it.
How to Fix
Fixing a broken SEO strategy will always start with keywords. To fix this common SEO issue you will need to adjust your strategy to be more aligned with the terms your looking to target. This means taking a deep dive into your target audience and performing robust keywords research before you ever write a piece of content.
Pro tip: Include voice search and question-based keywords in your research process.
Tools To Use
The best tool to use for this is the Google Search console as it will tell you exactly the types of content that your website shows up for. The Search Console will also tell you what content is indexed and what is not. This will allow your to take a data driven approach towards your SEO efforts and will make the process easier to do.
2. Your Content Does Not Match Search Intent
In SEO there are four (4) different types of search intent. Every search that is performed by a user must be matched with the “intent” behind their search whether it is finding information, navigating to a specific website, making a purchase, or something else. Google will prioritize content that solves a problem a user is searching for.
Search Intent Types & Examples
Informational:
A user wants to learn about a topic, understand a concept, or find answers to questions.
Example: “What is SEO?“, “How many keywords should I use?“, “Does ChatGPT Content Hurt SEO?“.
Navigational:
The user wants to find a specific website or page, often using a branded query.
Example: “Twitter,” “Google,” “Facebook,” “Cindtoro.”
Commercial:
The user is researching products or services before making a purchase, seeking comparisons, reviews, or pricing information.
Example: “best SEO company,” “iPhone 15 vs Samsung Galaxy S23,” “Blue apron review”.
Transactional:
The user wants to complete a specific action, such as making a purchase, booking a flight, or downloading a file.
Example: “Hire Marketing Agency,” “marketing agency templates,” “Download Adobe PDF”.
What You Can Do
In order to fix your content’s performance on Google search. You need to change the way you create new pieces of content. Keywords queries need to be matched to the intent of the user. This can be done by analyzing your top ranking pages for your target keywords to ensure that your content is helpful to users.
In other words, if your content is about “what is SEO” your article should cover every possible topic inside of that article including but not limited to a unique description, how long does it take, how to improve it, etc etc.
3. Your Website is Technically Broken And You Don’t Know It
Your website may be broken and you don’t even know it. Often when your seo is not getting results this is one of the most likely causes. Technical SEO deals with numerous elements such as crawl errors, broken links, duplicate container issues, poor XML sitemap implementation and other issues.
Technical SEO is similar to building the base of a house. If you have a shaky foundation your house will likely fall. Getting technical with your SEO is a core fundamental of great performance in providing a great user experience and having a high performance in Google search.
What you can do
To find out if your SEO does not work due to technical issues you should run an SEO audit. You perform an SEO audit on your own but we should warn you that it will take a considerable amount of time to complete successfully especially if it is your first time. Alternatively you can also have our SEO team perform one for you..
4. Your Website Is Too Slow
Going hand and hand with technical SEO is the speed of your website. Website speed is now a known Google ranking factor without a fast loading website you are significantly harming the results of your SEO efforts.
Website speed is mainly composed of Core Web Vitals which is a set of three metrics (LCP, CLS, and INP) Google uses to evaluate a website’s user experience on a webpage, impact its ranking in search results. The main factors that contribute to web vitals poor performance are normally Js and CSS files.
What you can do
There are a number of ways you can address a slow website speed. One of the first things you can do is compress your images. Image compression speeds up your website by making the images on your website smaller in size so the browser loads them faster.
This can also be paired with lazy loading. Implementing lazy loading helps to delay when the web browser loads your images ( only loading them as you scroll down the page as needed)
After you implement lazy loading and image compression. You should remove any third party scripts that you do not need. Every script on your website needs to be called as a resource and will waste valuable speed having to load elements that do not matter on your website.
If all else fails and your web speed does not improve you may need to switch to a better hosting provider that offers more resources.
Tools you can use
There are a number of website speed testing tools to assess your core web vitals, and website page speed. At Cindtoro we prefer Google PageSpeed Insights there are others as well. We also have our own internal tools.
5. You Don’t Have Any (Or Good Enough) Backlinks
Backlinks, if you are familiar with SEO you likely knew this was coming. You can either love or hate them but you need them. Without backlinks you will almost never be able to rank your content on the search engine results pages. You can have amazing content on your website but if you have no links it will not matter. Google sees backlinks as votes of trust and without them they do not need your site worthy to rank in the search results.
Ways to build Backlinks
Building links in a way that does not violate Google’s guidelines is difficult and expensive. There are some specific ways you can create better opportunities for yourself, guest posting, HARO (help a reporter out) digital PR and the skyscraper technique are all great ways to effectively build links.
What types of links should you build?
In the long game of SEO less is more. Google would rather see high quality content paired with high authority links from sources they know and trust. This helps them ensure that you are not trying to game their algorithm as most people attempt to do.
6. You’re Not Publishing Consistently
If you have been “doing SEO and are still not seeing results” that you want it is also likely because you are not investing heavily into your content marketing strategy. Stale outdated websites do not rank on Google. Google values high quality content made for people not search engines. This is becoming increasingly important with the advent of ChatGPT and other AI tools because Google is getting flooded with low quality content made for the sole purpose of manipulating their algorithms.
What you can do
If you want to have a shot at ranking highly in Google you will need to not only create content on a consistent basis but you will also need to ensure it contains high quality relevant keywords, satisfies search intent and truly solves the problem a user is experiencing.
One of the best ways to address this is to build a content calendar. An SEO content calendar will help you stay on track with overall content strategy as a whole. This is done so you don’t shoot in the dark with your SEO efforts. You can also update older blog post that are performing well and blog regularly with new content.
Check out what happens with the compounding effect of creating content.
7. You Are Over-Optimizing (Yes, That’s a Thing)
Trying to game the Google algorithm will get you penalized by Google. This happens because you are focusing on SEO too much. Your likely keyword stuffing ( a practice where you repeat keywords over and over again in an unnatural process. Or using unnatural headings throughout your content. Heading tags are meant to describe the content on a page not to be stuffed with keywords
What you can do
Avoiding over-optimization is actually relatively easy to do. You should always write for humans, not search engines. Keywords should be written in a way that sounds natural to a reader.
A great way to test your readability for SEO is to read your content aloud.
If it sounds “off” in any way or could be worded differently you should take steps to make it flow as clearly as possible. Don’t worry about adding keywords in as many places as you can. A search engine is smart enough to understand what your content is about.
You should also consider using keyword alternatives that help with LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which adds to Google’s overall understanding of a topic.
If you over-optimizing for SEO you are on a likely list to get impacted by a Google algorithm update.
8. You’re Ignoring Mobile & UX
A surprising cause of your SEO not working could also be the overall design of your website. Most people are constantly thinking about how to improve their content or get more backlinks. But never stop to consider the vessel for those key elements YOUR WEBSITE.
People want to use websites that look beautiful and function well on both mobile and desktop devices. If your website does not look amazing then you will lose business to a competitor who has theirs dialed in. And you will continue to say to yourself that SEO is dead.
How you can fix it
If having a great website just became a priority to you there are a few key places you should look to. Always make sure to have a clear navigation bar that lets you get to your most important pages first. Next, focus on having a responsive design that conforms to various different types of devices.
This means your website should look good on mobile, and desktop no matter the size of the screen. Finally, nobody likes random popups to keep these things a bare minimum. If you choose to use them you should make the exit buttons clear to see so users can clear the popup if desired.
9. Your SEO Strategy Is Missing Local or Niche Optimization
SEO will never work if you are too broad with you keywords especially if you are a local business or you have not niched down into a specific target market. By not targeting local keywords you are harming your SEO. Most searches will be local anyhow Don’t neglect local search to play with the big brands.
What Your can do
Your biggest hurdle is localized content. If you are a local business all of your efforts should focus on creating content for your community. Think of things such local backlinks, Google business Profile Optimization and other SEO strategies you can use to your advantage. You can also build citations and encourage your customers to leave great Google reviews
10. You Haven’t Waited Long Enough
All good things take time. SEO is no different. To see positive momentum you should expect to wait 3 to 6 months at a bare minimum. Growth from SEO happens over time with consistent action on a daily or weekly basis.
When you continually create content you are helping to show Google that your website is valuable to users and will help solve the needs of users. This takes a significant amount of time to create and for Google to trust you enough to show your website to users.
If you look above we provided an image showing what consistent content creation and a long term mindset will do for your overall SEO efforts.
What You Can Do
Fixing this issue means tracking your results, being consistent about your content creation and link buildings strategy. As long as you do these things and continue to push forward, SEO will work for you just like it works for millions of other websites.
We encourage you to read some of our case studies to see what a high quality SEO strategy can do for you.
Conclusion
SEO is not just about one thing; it takes a systematic approach to improving your performance in search. SEO is not dead and it will work but only if you invest in If you have done these steps in this article or you want our team to handle it for you, reach out to a member of our team or get a SEO audit.
We recommend reading:
Google Search Console Vs Rapid URL Indexer
Can Duplicate Yelp Listings Affect SEO?
How To Attract More Visitors To Your Google Business Profile