It is important to know how to fix SEO issues the moment they arise to maintain online visibility and organic traffic. After all, 75% of people never scroll past page one of search results, which means your business needs to make SEO a top priority.
Our experts discuss 10 common SEO issues and steps to improve SEO performance — let’s see what you can do.
Table of Contents
10 Reasons Your SEO Isn’t Working (and How To Fix It)
From the overly technical to basic issues that you might have overlooked, here are 10 potential reasons your SEO isn’t bringing the results you were expecting.
- You Haven’t Performed a Technical SEO Audit
- You Aren’t Conducting Effective Keyword Research
- You Aren’t Publishing Valuable Content
- Your Website Isn’t Built To Convert
- Your Images Are Slowing Down Your Site
- You Aren’t Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
- You Aren’t Investing in Internal Links and Link Building
- You Forgot To Optimize Page Titles, H2s, and Metadata
- Your Images Aren’t Optimized for Search
- Your SEO Goals, Timeline, Budget, and Reports Do Not Match
1. You Haven’t Performed a Technical SEO Audit
Performing an SEO audit is a necessary first step when developing your SEO strategy. It will identify key problems and inefficiencies in your website’s content, design, and overall technical makeup.
Without a technical SEO audit, you risk repeating mistakes you may have made in the past with your SEO strategy while also failing to develop a foundational understanding of your best opportunities and biggest threats.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
Many brands skip this step entirely and try to figure out how to improve SEO strategies without knowing what’s wrong in the first place. Additionally, you might not be using the right tools to measure your website’s performance.
Without an audit, you may take ineffective measures to boost SEO. Then, Google’s algorithm may misunderstand key components of your website, not ranking your content for the appropriate keywords, indexing your site incorrectly, or punishing your site for mistakes you don’t even know you’re making.
How You Can Fix It
The most effective way of fixing this problem is by teaming up with a professional SEO services provider who can perform a thorough technical audit and provide actionable insights. With this information, you can craft an overarching SEO strategy to help your website rank on page one.
In addition, you can use reliable SEO tools such as SEMRush and Ahrefs to track your website’s SEO health, discover which keywords you are ranking for, and which pages are doing well. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are other professional resources that will show you how your website is performing and ensure that Google is properly indexing your website.
To get your SEO back on track following an audit:
- Work with SEO professionals and web developers to fix code issues that may be hindering proper indexing and rankings.
- Improve site speed, mobile friendliness, content value, metadata, and other audit findings.
- Map your website, content, and link-building strategies to reflect top keyword opportunities.
2. You Aren’t Conducting Effective Keyword Research
You can’t just pick a keyword phrase out of thin air and decide to start optimizing for it. Brands need to conduct strategic research to ensure the keywords they target are ones their audiences search for, indicating an intent to purchase products or services.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
Improper keyword research can fail in different ways:
- Not using reliable keyword research tools
- Blindly following your competitors without conducting your proper research
- Using keywords that are not achievable (high keyword difficulty with many sites competing to rank for it)
- Optimizing for keywords with a low search volume (not enough people are using them)
- Using keywords that aren't relevant to your brand or audience
- Not including the keywords you’re trying to rank effectively in your content marketing strategy
How You Can Fix It
To ensure you’re hitting the mark, you need to:
- Use proper tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Yoast to identify the right keywords.
- Determine how often you should use certain keywords.
- Make sure you include keywords in metadata, titles, and headlines, and front load them whenever possible.
- Prioritize the user experience and keywords that make sense to your audience.
Some businesses are unaware that there is data available to precisely research which keywords their customers are searching for, how frequently these searches occur, and how difficult it will be to rank your website for them. Make sure you take advantage of these tools.
3. You Aren’t Publishing Valuable Content (And You Aren’t Updating Outdated Content)
It is easy for brands to create a content marketing strategy that doesn’t complement SEO initiatives or captivate consumers.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
The biggest mistake brands make with content is not crafting it around the best keyword opportunities. Maybe you aren’t even considering your target keywords, and just posting blogs because you heard it was “good to do for SEO.”
You may also be posting content that isn’t relevant or informative, which will then be evaluated as low quality by search engine algorithms. This harms user experience, increases bounce rates, and decreases time users spend on the site, which damages website rankings.
Another misstep is creating solely promotional content. Consumers respond to and trust high-quality, valuable content that addresses their needs and pain points.
How You Can Fix It
Google and other search engines care about the quality of your content. Therefore, it needs to be:
- High value
- Informative
- Beneficial for your audiences
- Include strategic keywords related to the topic
- Thorough (2,000 words for highly competitive keywords is a good standard)
The more valuable a consumer finds your content, the more credible your site appears to Google and the higher you rank.
“For our clients, every blog post we publish with our done-for-you blog writing service is sent for review, along with our target keyword, search volume, and ranking difficulty score,” says Kris Asleson, digital strategist at Midas Marketing. “While there’s more to a great blog post than merely trying to rank for one primary keyword, this at least gives our clients some understanding and direction of the content strategy we are executing on their behalf.”
In addition, republishing old content that you’ve optimized is equally important for SEO. You can simply continue improving upon already existing content that provides value. To successfully reoptimize old content, you can:
- Evaluate current ranking and create a plan to improve performance
- Integrate updated statistics and credible facts
- Include high-performing keywords and match search intent
- Update meta titles, descriptions, and headings
- Add engagement elements such as FAQs, quote boxes, and related content
How to increase SEO for existing content? Track its performance and reoptimize posts once they reach a certain ranking threshold, such as page 3 or better in search results for their keywords. When done correctly, fresh content can help push your ranking.
4. Your Website Isn’t Built To Convert
Google doesn’t just care about your content; it also considers how your website functions. One important element that factors into your search engine ranking is website speed optimization. Page experience is critical for Google’s core ranking systems, with a loading performance of 2.5 seconds as the benchmark. Fast website loading times also signify excellent UX design, which is a major green flag for search engines.
Other important user experience indicators include 404 pages and broken links. If your website has a lot of links that lead to nonexistent pages, your search engine rankings will suffer.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
Your site speed can take a major hit due to the platform it's built on. Wix, WordPress, and Drupal are great options, but if you don’t make the necessary updates, your web pages may take too long to load.
Caching could also be slowing down your site. It stores small amounts of website data, which leads to quicker load speeds. Similarly, an unreliable or unsecured server can compromise your design and lead to slow-loading pages.
Finally, if you remove a web page without adding a 301 redirect, you’re disrupting the user experience and directing potential conversions to a blank page which will diminish trust in your brand. If you change a page’s URL, include a redirection from the old URL to the new one.
How You Can Fix It
You need to ensure that your site is running at maximum capacity. A technical SEO audit will help you see if your site is fast enough.
Another great tool is Google PageSpeed Insights. This resource will test your website and its pages to measure speed. It will also show you if there are barriers blocking its speed and efficiency. From there, you can formulate a roadmap to improve the faults you find.
Work with your web development team to automatically redirect any broken or removed web pages to a fully functional page with a similar message. You should also remove any broken interlinks from your web pages regularly.
5. Your Images Are Slowing Down Your Site
Your website images could also negatively impact your page loading times.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
When images are too large, they can obliterate screens and create poor user experience. Additionally, large images can take a long time to load, making your design look sloppy and disorganized. Large images and slow loading times also ruin mobile browsing sessions. This is bad for online experiences and rankings, especially because Google places a lot of emphasis on mobile platforms.
How You Can Fix It
Images can be fixed by using Gimp, Photoshop, and other editing tools. WordPress users can implement resizing plugins that do a lot of the optimization heavy lifting. You can easily find tools that compress file size without a noticeable difference to the naked eye. This ensures the site loads quickly but the image looks high quality.
It’s also important for your brand to use JPG or JPEG, not PNG. JPEG files can be compressed without any noticeable differences and help the website load faster. Aim for files under 500 kb.
Following these best practices will ensure your images won’t negatively impact how your site loads.
6. You Aren’t Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
In recent years, Google has moved to a mobile-first indexing approach. So, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, your chances of ranking for your target keywords drop significantly.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
The biggest problem your brand can encounter is that your design just isn’t responsive, meaning it only functions optimally on a desktop.
A few reasons for a lack of mobile design are as follows:
- You didn't create a mobile website at the same time as your desktop version
- You used the wrong coding language
- You block images on mobile
- Loading speeds are too slow
- Images are too big
How You Can Fix It
You can fix your mobile SEO strategy by simply investing more time and energy into your mobile design.
To create a mobile-friendly platform:
- Ensure the content and images load correctly and quickly.
- Make sure the font sizes are readable.
- Make CTAs clear and clickable.
- Use proper image sizing and format.
- Keep testing your design for all screen sizes.
Following these steps will ensure your website ranks well and engages mobile users.
7. You Aren’t Investing in Internal Links and Link Building
Internal and external links are important when it comes to SEO. Embedding valuable and relevant links in your content will increase visibility and credibility. That aligns you as a leader in the eyes of these search engines.
Internal links make it easier for your site to be indexed by search engine bots. They also make the user experience seamless for your customers, which is imperative for SEO.
“Data has shown consistently throughout the years that having a healthy variety of external links to your website is one of the top-ranking factors for SEO domination,” says Asleson.
“Getting authoritative external links placed on industry-relevant websites pointing back to your site takes a lot of work and is one of the reasons SEO can be expensive [...] Make sure you get clarity on this element of your link-building strategy before you engage with any [SEO link building agency]! At Midas, we have several SEO packages we offer as a done-for-you service, all of which can be customized specifically for your business.”
It’s worth noting that links can hurt your SEO strategy if you don’t use them correctly.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
- You use no-follow links so Google can't see them.
- Links don’t open in the same window, which disrupts the user experience.
- You link too often to the same keyword, which may be flagged as spam.
- You aren't linking at all to other pages on your site.
- Interlinks and CTAs to other sections on your website don't make sense for the user.
- Your links come from websites that lack credibility or have poor domain authorities.
- You're including too many links to the same sources.
- You aren’t getting the same follow links back from other sources.
- The links come from sites or topics that are unrelated to your business.
How You Can Fix It
- Categorize internal links as follow links so Google can see them.
- Ensure that the keywords hyperlinked make sense with the content on the page the link is directed to.
- Don’t link using the same keywords every time; make your wording unique.
- Don’t use too many internal links — one or two in a 1,000-word article is perfectly adequate.
- Reach out to relevant and reputable sites in your niche for link-building opportunities.
- Diversify your anchor text among your external links and focus on branded links, where your company name, rather than your keyword, is the linked text.
Following these link-building best practices will ensure Google picks your site and ranks it positively.
8. You Forgot To Optimize Page Titles, H2s, and Metadata
Metadata, headlines, and titles all have a place in the overall Google ranking algorithm. Page titles, meta descriptions, and page heading tags are what search engines read first when they index your site. They help Google understand what your page is about so the algorithm can accurately rank it.
- Title – This is the phrase you see when you roll over the title tab on a website. This is the information Google analyzes and uses to populate a search page.
- H (heading) tag – This is the line of code that distinguishes a line of text as important. It gives a piece of content structure and clarity for users and search engines.
- Meta description – This is the block of content that search engines use to understand the content on your page. This sits under the homepage title on a search engine results page.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
If you aren't using any keywords in these areas, your page won’t rank well (or at all). Conversely, stuffing too many keywords into H1s, H2s, and H3s can look like spam.
Problems also arise when your meta descriptions don't concisely and accurately describe your content. It’s important to note that ranking is just the first step. If your meta description isn’t compelling, your site may still rank high, but your click-through rate (CTR) will suffer as users won’t be inspired to click on your URL. Instead, they will scroll down to later results that describe what they are looking for.
How You Can Fix It
- Make sure your titles, tags, and descriptions are the correct lengths.
- Front-load your keywords whenever possible.
- Perform thorough keyword research to take advantage of relevant terms.
Don’t be afraid to include a few H2s and H3s that solely exist to improve user experience and content quality! These website elements grab the attention of search engine bots and are embedded in the HTML of your site. This content carries weight and adds value to your page by establishing a solid background and foundation for search engines to base your authority and credibility on. Plus, it adds value for your customers.
9. Your Images Aren’t Optimized for Search
It’s important to include imagery — including pictures, illustrations, and video — on your website. However, if they aren’t optimized, Google won’t notice them, and they won’t positively impact your SEO rankings.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
Pictures and videos also help to lead consumers on a journey and help to condense important information, which increases conversions.
These images need certain metadata to be effective:
- Alt image tags
- Alt image titles
- Image captions (when appropriate)
Without these elements, Google’s algorithms will not be able to understand and index your page. And if they can’t understand your page, these images won’t help your page populate a Google search result or improve traditional search rankings.
How You Can Fix It
Because Google reads alt image titles and tags, including them will automatically improve your content and rankings. So, include appropriate and relevant SEO keywords. Alt image tags should also describe the image, which also helps general website accessibility.
The good news? These metadata fields can be the same! Just make sure not to stuff an entire paragraph of keywords into your image’s SEO data, as this will hurt your rankings.
10. Your SEO Goals, Timeline, Budget, and Reports Do Not Match
It can take up to 6 months or longer to see any valuable upticks in website rankings from making SEO improvements.
Higher rankings become more difficult with competitive keywords that have many sites competing for them. This uphill battle can result in a long and expensive search engine optimization process with smaller, less frequent milestones.
What Your Brand Did Wrong
SEO takes a lot of time and money, especially for highly competitive markets and keywords. However, brands — particularly those with smaller budgets — make missteps when they:
- Throw all their resources into a keyword that is nearly impossible to rank for.
- Expect drastic ranking improvements in a short amount of time.
- Continually hire and fire different SEO experts in search of fast results that are not realistic.
- Don’t have access to website data, SEO campaign performance analytics, clear-cut reporting information, and desired milestones and deadlines.
How You Can Fix It
Set realistic expectations. If you have a smaller budget, it may take you a long time to rank for major keywords. In the meantime, set more achievable objectives. Look for less competitive keywords or local SEO opportunities and invest in strategic improvements to help you rank there first. This will get the ball rolling while you slowly improve your site’s performance for the most lucrative keywords.
Plus, have patience! If it seems that nothing is working, you might get frustrated, panic, and cycle through many SEO experts searching for immediate results. But the reality is that there is no quick fix. Find a reliable SEO company that communicates honestly and can help you set realistic goals. Then, have patience as you work together to improve organic traffic and site rankings.
“Even though SEO takes time, a winning SEO partner will be able to guide you along the way,” advises Asleson.
“For example, you will gain a ton of valuable insights during the first month of research and analysis [...] After that, we optimize your website SEO to reflect the best opportunities we find considering your budget and goals [...] we [look] at new keywords ranked in the top 100, how those keywords are moving, [and] how well your organic website traffic is growing [to drive] new customers through organic discovery of your business. So, while [SEO] does take a while, it’s not a matter of simply hoping new customers start finding your website at some indefinite point in the future.”
Ultimately, the best SEO firm for your brand will produce regular, in-depth, and easy-to-understand SEO campaign reports that outline the following:
- How the initiatives are performing.
- How your website is ranking for specific keywords.
- Analysis as to what worked and what did not.
- Suggestions for future improvements.
- Projected results.
- And more
How Black Hat SEO Techniques Harm Your Website Rankings
Black hat SEO refers to the practice of trying to game the search engine algorithms by over-optimizing websites, content, and link-building tactics to create an advantage over competitors without building the natural site authority to rank for target keywords.
Brands that conduct black hat SEO manipulate search engine guidelines and algorithms without considering the human aspect of the online experience. They are not valuable for users and are eventually penalized with a lower search engine ranking.
Engaging in black hat SEO tactics is unethical. These tactics aim to cheat their way to the top in a short amount of time instead of running an SEO campaign that builds a real relationship with Google and other search engines.
These black hat techniques can lead to sites getting banned and blacklisted:
- Content automation
- Building links with WordPress themes, widgets, etc.
- Keyword stuffing
- Hidden text and links
- Expired domain names
- Link schemes/link manipulation
- Duplicate content
Check out our backlinking strategies guide to stay in the white lane of SEO.
Improve Your Website Rankings With White Hat SEO
Businesses should use white hat SEO techniques or “search engine-approved” best practices to rank higher on SERPs. Organic SEO strategies are designed to promote a website’s content and authority in a natural way. By doing this, user experience is prioritized above search engine algorithms, which improves rankings in the long run.
Some white hat optimization strategies to implement include:
- Creating a mobile-friendly website
- Improving UX
- Link building from reliable, relevant websites
- Performing keyword research
- Optimizing metadata
- Pinpointing content that already ranks well, then adding to it and promoting it
Because intent is already established through the user’s search query, the quality of leads from organic SEO initiatives is often better compared to other marketing campaigns and strategies.
If you aren’t getting organic traffic, leads, or sales, take a closer look at your SEO strategy and make the appropriate changes to optimize it.
How To Fix SEO: Key Takeaways
Optimizing your website to rank organically for your top keywords isn’t as hard as it might seem. That said, it is still an endeavor that will take time, careful planning, and a deep understanding of the technical and digital marketing landscape.
If your SEO efforts have failed in the past, either through poor performance from an SEO company or through your own attempts, you can pinpoint the pain areas holding you back in this article.
SEO is a jungle and it’s easy to make mistakes that hurt your brand. However, online search has become a crucial marketing channel for businesses and always will be. Working with digital agencies or having a trusted SEO vendor on your team is crucial if you aren’t an expert yourself. Learn from past errors and prepare for the future with the simple fixes in this guide.
How To Fix SEO FAQs
1. How do I fix SEO on my website?
To fix SEO on your website, focus on these key steps:
- Identify relevant keywords for your content
- Optimize title tags, meta descriptions, and content with your chosen keywords
- Create valuable, original, and engaging content
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
- Improve page loading times for a better user experience
- Enhance site navigation and usability
- Build reputable backlinks to your site
- Address technical issues like sitemaps, robots.txt, and schema markup
- Use tools like Google Analytics to track performance
- Stay current with SEO best practices and algorithm changes
2. How can I improve my SEO performance?
To improve your SEO performance, focus on optimizing your website for search engines by creating high-quality, relevant content, optimizing on-page elements (such as title tags and meta descriptions), building high-quality backlinks, and ensuring a mobile-friendly and fast-loading site. Regularly monitor and adapt your strategy to algorithm updates and user trends.
