If SEO Isn't Working for You Find out Why

When someone says SEO isn’t working, what they usually mean is one of a few things.

They are not seeing traffic.
They are not ranking for anything they care about.
When they search for their business, other websites show up instead of theirs.
They have blog posts on their site, but they are not getting traffic from them.

  

Sometimes they look at Google Search Console and see impressions but very few clicks. Sometimes they see clicks but still don't see leads or sales. Either way, it feels discouraging. They have invested time and effort in SEO, but they are not seeing the payoff.

 

Before we talk about what to fix, it is important to understand what is actually happening.

  

What people think SEO isn’t working means

Most business owners assume that if SEO is not working, something must be wrong with their website.

They wonder if it’s a technical issue.
They think maybe their website platform isn’t good for SEO.
They assume their niche is too competitive.

They wonder if they need a site redesign. 
They assume SEO just doesn’t work for their niche.

 

I see this a lot when talking to new students or answering questions in my free training classes. I get the same questions week after week –

 

Does this work for my niche?

Do I need to switch platforms?

Will this work with your system if I’ve already tried it on my own and it hasn’t worked yet?

Can I really do this? 

I want to assure you, yes, SEO can work for your niche. You very likely don’t need to switch platforms. It’s even less likely that you need a brand-new website to have SEO work. Yes, you can do this 100%. It’s most likely that you’ve made a few mistakes that are causing your SEO not to work yet. It’s not a forever issue; it’s a you haven’t figured it out yet.

 

The real reasons SEO usually isn’t working

 

When I review websites with business owners, the same issues keep coming up. 

The first is inconsistency in effort, which will definitely impact results. It’s not that they haven’t tried; it’s that they haven’t done everything they need to do to succeed with SEO.

 
Many people have started doing SEO on their websites, but because they’ve learned tactics rather than the overall strategy they need, they have only done part of the work.  They may have installed an SEO plugin, written a title tag (or had their plugin generate it), added a meta description, or even added keywords to a webpage to help their site rank. But, because they don’t know exactly what’s involved in doing SEO on their site, they’ve only done part of the work, and that’s why they’re not seeing results yet. The good news is that a site that’s partially optimized can be fully optimized with the right strategy pretty quickly and become more visible.

Why SEO keywords can keep your SEO from working

 

The second is keyword strategy. This is one I see all the time. I see the same three issues with keywords that regularly keep SEO from working for entrepreneurs.

Keyword strategy issues keep sites from ranking more than technical or content issues, in my experience.

 

Many sites are targeting keywords they won’t rank for. They are thinking about keywords and choosing them, which is great, but they don’t understand how Google ranks sites, so they’re choosing keywords their site won’t rank for because of the competition in their niche. 

 

The second issue I see with keyword strategy is that they’re not choosing keywords that buyers use when searching. They may be choosing keywords and using them in all the right places. They could even be ranking and getting traffic to their site, but the traffic isn’t converting because they’re not bringing the right people into their world. 

 

The third keyword-related issue I see regularly is that they’re using the same keyword on every page. Using the same keyword across most or all of your website will limit your site’s potential reach because Google won’t show your site more than twice in the search results. You want to target different keywords on each page of your site to expand your reach as much as possible.

 

 

Why Content Strategy can keep your SEO from working

 

Google, and now our AI search tools, want to find content from websites with the best information on the subject. They want to make sure the information they’re sharing is as correct as possible. They want to be careful which sites they share with searchers, and because of this, the quality of content on your website is important. The type of content you create also plays a big role in your overall SEO success.

 

With Google, we want to create content in clusters around certain topics. This isn’t new advice; I was doing this with content strategy for my clients at the agency back in 2012. It’s been this way for a long time. You want to choose topic areas, clusters, or whatever you want to call them, that are tied to your business if you want your content to drive leads and sales. You want to keep your content tied to those topic areas so that Google and AI search engines recognize you as an expert in those areas. 

 

For example, I write about SEO, content, podcasting, and marketing metrics. For almost a decade, I’ve written about these topics in one way or another. I’ve had other topic clusters in the past decade, but any posts that are not relevant to the business or my ideal customer today have been removed from the site to preserve the quality of the overall content.

 

If you have been blogging for a long time and have old posts that aren’t relevant to your content today, or if you have topics that are all over the place and can’t be categorized easily, you may have a content strategy problem. It’s possible that SEO isn’t working as well as it could for you because Google isn’t really sure what your website or blog is about. 

How low-quality content can make your SEO not work

 

In addition to needing to keep your content strategy tight and focusing on creating content that’s helpful to your ideal customer and broken down into a handful of categories, you also need to make sure that the content is of high enough quality and unique enough that Google and AI search engines want to share it with searchers.

 

I recently worked with a new student. She’d joined the program because she had lost all of her website traffic and was trying to figure out what was broken. She’d received unsolicited reports from people wanting her to hire them to do SEO for her, and they’d convinced her that her website had horrible technical mistakes that were what had broken her website traffic.

When I met with her and reviewed her site, I suspected she had been hit by the Helpful Content algorithm update. Her site had been around for years, but its content wasn’t unique, in-depth, or, honestly, very helpful to her audience. Most of the content on her site was sponsored posts from other websites. We discussed her options, and I told her she needed to decide if she wanted to remove the sponsored posts and create content of her own or stop trying to get the site to rank on Google. Because in all honesty, the site as it was wasn’t going to rank high on Google anymore. Her SEO wasn’t working because even with good optimization, the content wasn’t what Google wanted to show to searchers anymore. 

 

Sometimes we use the wrong SEO data to make decisions

 

This question actually came up on our student Q&A call this week. One of my students was auditing her blog and trying to decide which posts to keep and which to get rid of. She was asking about keyword rankings and which strategy to use for specific blog posts based on those rankings. 

 

She asked about two keywords in particular that didn’t make sense to her and didn’t really align with the blog post’s core content. She asked what she should do about the two. I looked at them with her and asked if she was using Google Search Console for the keyword ranking information, and she said yes. I told her she could ignore both keywords completely because search console isn’t really a great keyword tool. Sure, she was ranking for the terms, but one was so grammatically incorrect she would never want to have it on her site, and the other one had nothing to do with her blog post or business, and if she did rank for it, she would get irrelevant traffic to her site, and it would hurt her in the long run.

 

Sometimes, when you’ve tried to learn SEO on your own, you’ve been introduced to tools that people are using for the wrong thing. Yes, Google Search Console has keyword ranking data, and no, I don’t use it for that. I make my keyword strategy decisions based on data in a keyword research tool, not Search Console. I’ve used Search Console since it was Google Webmaster Tools 15+ years ago. Search Console is great for indexation and crawl information, but don’t use it to set your keyword strategy. That’s not what it’s designed for. I see a lot of people in the entrepreneurial and blog world using Search Console for keyword ideas or to make keyword strategy decisions, and it’s really not the best tool for that. We absolutely don’t use it for that in the corporate world, or at least we never did in my experience. 

  

Why SEO takes time, and why that matters

 

SEO does not work overnight.

 

A single blog post rarely ranks immediately. It can take months for content to move up the search results pages and become visible. The time it takes for SEO to work varies from business to business. Your website’s ability to rank for keywords will vary from your friend’s website because each site’s ranking ability is unique to its niche and competitive set. What does that actually mean? Some websites can rank for more competitive terms more easily than others because fewer people in their market do SEO. I have several students and clients who are lucky because their competitors aren’t doing SEO yet, so it’s been easier for them than for others in very competitive niches. It doesn’t mean SEO won’t work for those in a competitive niche; it just means we need to take a different approach to our content strategy to find opportunities for their websites. 

 

Your SEO isn’t broken, but the strategy might be

If SEO is not working for you, that does not mean SEO does not work for your niche.

It usually means:

• The keyword strategy needs to be adjusted
• The content isn’t right for your business
• There’s more to do on your website
• The tools you are using are not giving you the full picture

 

SEO is one of the most powerful marketing channels available to small business owners, and I want to help you benefit from it. But it works best when you work from an overall SEO strategy, not a collection of tactics.

 

 

If you are tired of trying to figure this out on your own, join me in Simple SEO Content today and let me walk you through it step by step. I’ll help you figure out what you’ve done right so far, what’s gone wrong, and what you need to do to make sure SEO works for you this time.