You’ve found a topic to write about, conducted some keyword research, maybe even had a look at what your competitors are doing, and created a webpage that you’re happy with.
You’ve hit publish, expecting to have crowds of traffic to be drawn to your website, and a few weeks later, you’re nowhere to be seen on the SERPs (search engine results page).
Now you’re left wondering why your webpage isn’t performing as well as you’d expected.
We’ve picked out three reasons why your webpage may be having troubling ranking on the SERPs, and what our advice would be to improve them.
Duplicate content
Google is known to penalise websites with duplicate content. This means that the content that appears on your page also appears elsewhere on the web, or sometimes, elsewhere on your website.
Duplicate content can have a negative impact on search engine rankings, as crawl bots struggle to detect which page is the most relevant to the user’s query.
Google favours original content, so we’d recommend running your website through a plagiarism checker to identify any pages that could be influencing your ranking ability. Rewriting any flagged content could see your rankings skyrocket.
Not prioritising E-A-T
E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, is a framework used by Google to evaluate the quality of content on a website.
Google prioritises content that comes from knowledgeable, authoritative and trustworthy sources. They want to show results from people who know what they’re talking about.
There are many ways to improve the E-A-T of your website, including publishing author pages, building backlinks from reputable sources, and increasing the domain authority of your site.
Author pages let the reader put a face to the name. You’re much more likely to believe what you read if you know who it’s been written by.
Backlinks can help increase the authority of your website, as these show Google that reputable sources are recommending your content.
Similarly, creating content that is backed by research and data is a great way to show your expertise as a writer, which can help build the authority of your domain.
Have a look through your website and see where improvements can be made. Do you have author pages linking to your blog? Could you include data within your content to back your findings?
Outdated content
Outdated content could be having a detrimental effect on your ranking ability. If Google identifies that your content is no longer relevant or helpful to the reader, your page might as well be on the moon.
Just think, if you’re searching for the best digital marketing agency in Chester on Google, you’d want results for agencies that are open, not those that shut down five years ago.
This concept is the same for products or services. If you no longer sell a product or offer a service, but you have a page on your website offering these, this content is out of date and isn’t going to be prioritised by Google.
We’d recommend setting calendar reminders to update content on your website to avoid these pages becoming out-of-date and potentially penalised by Google. A few minutes spent changing some dates on a blog to retain a high position on the SERPS could drive lots of traffic to your website.
Need some help identifying why your website may be struggling to rank? Contact the friendly team at Engage Web today.
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