Even though you had a brilliant concept, produced a wonderful piece of content, and put it online for the world to see, your page isn’t performing as well as you had hoped.
Even the most experienced SEO experts encounter these frustrations, but don’t panic – there are a few possible reasons why your page is being prevented from taking the top spot on Google.
Technical Issues
Technical issues are one of the most common problems limiting your page’s performance on Google. If bots are unable to crawl the content of a page, then Google is going to have a hard time indexing it.
Some technical checks to make include:
Indexing issues
Google Search Console is your best friend here. You can manually input a URL into the ‘inspect page’ tool to see if the page is being indexed and will appear in Google Search Results.
Alternatively, you can navigate to ‘page indexing’ and see an overview of all the pages on your site that aren’t currently indexed. You’ll also be provided with insights into what is prohibiting the page from being indexed.
Once you’ve resolved these issues, your page will be indexed, and will begin to rank on the search engine results page.
Page speed
Google prioritises pages that provide a positive user experience, and one of its deciding factors is how quickly a page loads.
If a page takes too long to load, the user is likely to go elsewhere for their answer. Improving your page’s load speed could be the difference in ranking higher on the search engine results page.
Content issues
Even though you may be pleased with the content featured on your website, it’s possible that this is what is hindering your performance on the search engine results page.
Searcher intent
Even if you have created the most wonderful piece of content, if it doesn’t align with the intent of the searcher, you will have trouble ranking.
The purpose behind a user’s internet search is known as “searcher intent”. The searcher is seeking a certain result in response to their query.
For example, when you search for “chicken pie” on Google, the results page shows chicken pie recipes. However, when you search “buy chicken pie”, the results show retailers stocking chicken pies. The two search queries, despite their similarities, have different searcher intents.
It’s easy to check the searcher intent behind a keyword or phrase. To determine what Google thinks is most relevant, simply do a manual search on the search engine. If your content doesn’t match the intent behind the query, either optimise for a more relevant keyword, or adapt your content to match the intent.
Keyword cannibalisation
The concept of keyword cannibalisation is just as terrifying as it sounds!
This phrase describes pages on a website that rank for the same term, which can cause issues with Google. This may occur when content across multiple pages on a website is too similar.
Google often penalises pages that rank for the same term because it may find it difficult to determine which page is the most relevant to the user.
One page may be chosen by Google to be the canonical page, or the page it chooses to rank higher than the others.
To avoid keyword cannibalisation, make sure that each page on your website is appropriately optimised for the most relevant terms. As an alternative, you may tell Google which pages are more significant than others by using canonical tags.
Duplicate content
Sadly, there may be times, through no fault of your own, where you can’t avoid issues with duplicate content.
Even if you put the time and effort into drafting a unique and well-optimised piece of content, someone might visit your website, take your work, and publish it on their website as their own.
When this happens, Google struggles to determine which page had the original content, and as a result, the ranking of your page may suffer.
Use duplicate content auditing tools such as Copyscape to identify if your content has been duplicated elsewhere on the web. Rewrite any text that is flagged as duplicate content.
Need help identifying the reasons why your page isn’t ranking on Google? Speak to the friendly team at Engage Web today.
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