Your SEO content may be hurting your rankings.

Are you using irrelevant or overly complicated/competitive keywords that don’t match your content?

The biggest challenge is understanding whether you are! If you are this can have a detrimental effect on your business’s Google rankings, due to the algorithms designed to prioritise high-quality and relevant content, tailored to what prospects are searching.

Is your technical SEO all on point?

Overlooking on-page optimisation elements such as meta descriptions, title tags, and alt tags can make it hard for Google to understand your content and therefore hurt your rankings. If you don’t optimise these elements, Google might struggle to interpret your content and intent, which can result in lower rankings and missed opportunities.

Your content…

Publishing poor-quality content that isn’t helpful or informative will adversely affect visitor rates and can hurt your website’s engagement and rankings on Google. When prospects visit a website, they are looking for content that is informative, engaging, and relevant, to solving their problems. If your website is unsuccessful in providing high-quality relevant content, users may lose interest and look for better alternatives, like your competitors.

This will result in a high bounce rate, and low engagement, ultimately leading to a lower ranking on search engines. Google’s algorithms prioritise websites that provide high-quality, relevant content. Therefore, it is important to invest time and resources into creating helpful and informative content that directly addresses the needs of the search query.

Let’s say that you’ve written a great top-of-the-funnel blog, and you want to get as many views as possible. Two months after publishing, you check the performance of the post only to find that nobody has seen it…

• Have you used the correct and relevant keywords?
• Have you covered the topic in real detail?
• Does your title tag accurately reflect the article?

The title tag is a very important part of your on-page SEO as it lets Google understand your web page contents. Hence, even a minor change in the title could initiate a positive or negative change.

Social media SEO strategy.

A social media SEO strategy will help your business create better relationships with customers, signpost your content to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and help you better reach your target audience where they spend the most time. Social media interactions can also have a significant impact on your search engine rankings with Google. As people engage with your content on social sites, it increases its reach and will usually help you get higher rankings for search engine results.

Don’t fall into SEO Overdose!

Like anything, it is possible to have too much SEO. Search Engine Optimisation overdose involves cramming in too many keywords, irrelevant links, and other tactics to rank higher on Google. Over-optimisation can hurt your rankings, it may have worked in the past, but search engines have evolved and are aware of these tricks! 

Keyword stuffing, irrelevant keywords, and manipulative links will also make your content tough to read, resulting in users leaving your site and a drop in your rankings. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo will penalise websites that overdose SEO. These mistakes can result in your website being relegated from the top 100 pages altogether.

Instead of focusing on enhancing your content for search engines, concentrate on creating high-quality, relevant content for your audience. This will not only upgrade your search engine rankings but also grant value to your audience.

To conclude

When creating SEO content, it is a good idea to type your chosen keyword into Google to analyse the results that are displayed. Do you feel like you can generate content that will be more helpful than anything already shared?  Do the current search results match what you have in mind for this topic?

Are you using compelling visuals, which are proven to heighten user engagement with a piece of content, encouraging visitors stay on your page for longer and pay more attention to what you have to say. In a study by SEMrush, they found that articles with more engaging images, receive 116% more organic traffic in comparison to those who don’t. 

Go beyond making your existing content better: come up with new and original ideas, highlight innovative ways to resolve problems, and share viable case studies. In other words, act as a leader in your sector, making sure each page answers the key questions related to this search term.