5 ranking factors preventing your website from ranking high in Google

Intro

You're curious about your website's ranking position, so you open up Google Search Console and search for your target keywords. You don't see your website pop up in any good ranking position. That's strange. You open Ranktracker’s serp checker and it confirms your suspicion. What's happening? Why isn't your website showing up? You wonder what's wrong with your webpages. Despite all the time and effort you spent on keyword research and content strategy, your webpages are not ranking high on the Google search results...

There's nothing more frustrating than not seeing your content rank in Google, despite all the effort and time you invested in creating new content. The only way to start ranking in Google is by finding out what is preventing your website from ranking in the top of Googles search results. There are many factors that influence your SEO rankings. The field of search engine optimization is a very broad one.

Therefore, we will focus on 5 reasons why your content doesn't rank in Google:

1. poor website readability;
2. a lack of quality inbound links;
3. non-matching search intent;
4. keyword stuffing and using the wrong keywords;
5. Lack of (topical) authority.

One or several of these practices might prevent your website from ranking high in Google. Fortunately, you can turn the tide in your favor. In this blog post, we will discuss the steps you can take to improve your website's SEO rankings - starting today.

Here are five reasons why your content doesn't rank high in Google:

1. The readability of your website is poor

Your website's readability can vastly boost or hurt your website's overall SEO ranking.

When you don't use images, paragraphs and headings, your website's readability will be very poor. Our brains are programmed to perform tasks as efficiently as possible. So when something seems to take a lot of effort, such as reading a long piece of text, our brains are likely to search for alternatives. In the case of your website, it means going back to the search results and clicking on the next site in the SERP's.

What do we mean by "readability"''"? In essence, readability is the practice of making your website easy to understand and digest for your target audience. The readability of your web page depends on text presentation (e.g. font choice, spacing, colours, etc.) and context (the actual words and sentences written on your page). Readability is still considered an indirect ranking factor. It highly affects your SEO levels. Remember, Google only wants to show the best results they can. If your readers are not going to read your text, it most likely won't be the best result to show for Google.

Content effectiveness is just as important as content quality

Many content creators tend to overlook the readability of their content. They ensure that the best-fitted keywords and data-driven insights are all covered, but fail to adapt an _outsider's perspective _to their content. More often than not, a lot of emphasis is laid on content quality, while they overlook their content effectiveness. As a consequence, they end up writing content that is difficult to read and understand. Subsequently, readability is often an overlooked and neglected SEO ranking factor.

When your website pages leave your visitors confused rather than convinced, they will move on and look for other web pages that are easier to grasp. The Google algorithm keeps track of your visitors' behavior. A website that is easy to understand and digest, will be rewarded with a higher SEO ranking. When the algorithm detects that your visitors linger on your website for longer periods, it will receive positive signals that your website is a high-quality website, with helpful information.

Three questions answered in five seconds

Usually, your visitors will read less than a third of the content on your page. Therefore, you will have to ensure that your visitors can find the answers to the following questions within 5 seconds after visiting your website:

• What it is that you offer?
• How will your product or service solve your visitor's problem?
• Where can they get your product or service? (Is there a clear Call To Action?).

2. There is a lack of quality inbound links

When your content isn't ranking well on Google, it might be caused by a lack of quality inbound links: links placed on other websites that point to your site. They are also known as backlinks.

TIP: Use the Ranktracker Backlink checker to find out which websites are linking to yours.

Among SEO ranking factors, backlinks are one of the most important ones. The number of backlinks, as well as the quality of your backlinks, directly affect your SEO ranking. A helpful tool to evaluate how many backlinks you need, is simply by studying your competition. How many backlinks do they have? In the early days, gaining the most backlinks worked. Nowadays, you need high-quality links from well established sites to link to your site. It's much more efficient and also recommended in the Google guidelines.

“When it comes to backlinks, both quality and quantity matter.”

Not only do you need to gather the right number of backlinks to your website - you also need high-quality backlinks. High-quality backlinks are defined as:

• Links that come from authoritative, credible and trustworthy websites. Search engines use this information to determine your Domain Authority. Backlinks to your website that come from high-quality websites are an indicator for search engines that your website offers valuable information.
• Links that come from multiple sources. When you're building high-quality backlinks that only come from the same external source domain, you will get far less value than by building links from a variety of websites.

3. Your website content does not match the search intent of your visitors

The essence of SEO is optimizing your content to match your website visitors' expectations. It is all about ensuring that your website visitors will find the information they are looking for. After all, your website visitors go to your website with the purpose to find answers to their questions. If they don't find the information on your website that helps them to make a decision, they will simply leave your page. That's where search intent comes into play. Search intent is also referred to as _audience intent, user intent _or _key intent. _Search intent is the main goal that a user has when typing in a query. Put simply, search intent is the _why _behind a search query.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing only serve one goal: to help people find the content that is most relevant for them. When the information on your website matches the search intent of your website visitors, search engines will reward you with a higher SEO ranking. Simultaneously, when your content does not match a visitor's search intent, your content will be deemed irrelevant. In content creation, it is therefore crucial to always keep your visitors' search intent in mind. How do they find your website? What keywords do they use? What information do they want to find on your website?

Now that you know why search intent is important in the world of SEO, let's start optimizing for it. It's crucial to understand the different types of search intent. There are four common search intent types that you should keep in the back of your mind whenever you are creating content:

1. Informational search intent - to know something

Informational searches are the most common type of searches. Search engine users with this search intent have the intention to learn more about a certain topic. Informational search queries have the largest search volume. These type of searches occur in the discovery phase of searching.

2. Navigational search intent - to go somewhere

Users with a navigational search intent are looking for a desired page or website. They have a specific brand or company in mind that they want to find. They use the search engine to get to a specific product or service page. 3. Transactional search intent - to do something Transactional searches are the most commercial out of all search intents. People will type queries with phrases like ''price'' and ''sales'' in them. Visitors with a transactional search intent are ready to buy your product or service. 4. Commercial search intent - to do something later Commercial searches are a combination of informational and transactional searches. People with this search intent are in a phase where they want to make a purchase, but they are not yet certain as to what they would like to buy. To help them make that decision, they look for information that will help them select the right product.

Always know the search intent behind a query, that's the only way to create content that ranks highly in search results. Also create content for every stage of your customer journey. In that way, you ensure relevant traffic and maximize sales.

4. You're using too many keywords or irrelevant keywords

If your website uses too many keywords or irrelevant keywords, it will be deemed unnatural. Using too many keywords or irrelevant keywords is called _keyword stuffing. _Keyword stuffing is when a page is filled or “stuffed” with the same target term over and over, in the hope of ranking higher for that term in search engines. How do you determine whether you might be stuffing keywords on your webpages? The keyword density formula is a very helpful tool to evaluate whether you are using the right number of keywords on your website pages. Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a webpage as a ratio or percentage of the overall word count.

The keyword density formula

Keyword Density = (Number of words in text) / (Number of times keyword appears in text)

Before the Google algorithm changed, it was common to see high-ranking content with keyword densities as high as 50%. You will not benefit from this today. Rather, Google will penalize you for it. Instead, aim for a keyword density of 1 to 3%, meaning that the target keyword appears about one to three times per 100 words.

Making keywords invisible? Search engines will see right through you

A couple of years ago, keyword stuffing used to be a relatively successful SEO strategy that could drive your content towards better search engine rankings. However, that's no longer the case in 2022. In fact, keyword stuffing is now actually detrimental to your SEO rankings. Search engines have become significantly better at detecting when your website is filled with stuffed keywords. They are able to detect both visible and invisible keyword stuffing. When you're overusing keywords in page titles, meta descriptions and comment tags, search engines will deem this as keyword stuffing too and penalize your website for it. Are you hiding text on a page by putting white text on a white background? Search engine crawlers will find out about this. In conclusion, you have to ensure that you use just the right number of keywords - both for your visible and invisible keywords.

You're trying to rank for short-tail keywords

Generally speaking, short-tail keywords lack detail and are not specific. Because they are very general, they tend to have a higher search volume. Consequently, short-tail keywords are more competitive than long-tail keywords. If you are trying to rank for highly competitive short-tail keywords, but only have 1 to 2 pages on your site discussing these terms, it is going to be tough to appear in the first search results. However, you don't have to dismiss short-tail keywords altogether - you just have to do your research. If you happen to come across short-tail keywords with low competition, they are definitely worth your time and effort. How do you determine whether your targeted keywords are worth the shot?

The following two methods will help you:

The eyeball method

The least time intensive method is the so-called eyeball method, where you enter your target keywords in a search engine and analyze the first page in a glance. Which websites are ranking for your target keyword? If you mainly see a lot of Web 2.0 pages or Blogger/WordPress links, your chances of ranking high are good. On the contrary, if the search engine shows you mainly big brands and authoritative sites like Wikipedia, ranking high in search rankings will be hard.

Keyword difficulty method

A keyword’s difficulty is based on a number of different factors, including domain authority, page authority, and content quality. Therefore, a solid SEO tactic is to look at your competitors' domain metrics. You'll want to search for keywords with low DA (Domain Authority), PA (Page Authority) and backlinks. Is the DA under 50? Then your target keywords stand a good chance. However, if both DA and PA are above 50, you are dealing with very competitive keywords. You'll want to find low competition keywords, since these are the keywords that are the least time intensive and require less effort.

You might be wondering: where do I get this data from? How do I know whether my target keywords have a low or high DA? There are a variety of free and commercial tools that will help you determine which keywords to target. For instance, the Ranktracker Keyword Finder will give you a great summary of keyword difficulty and search volume. This makes it easy for you to find the right keywords to create content for.

These methods go well together. For example, it would make sense to first apply the eyeball method to different sets of keywords that you want to rank for. Based on these initial search results, you will have a fairly good impression of which keywords are highly competitive, and which keywords are not. Next, you look into the metrics of the list of keywords that made it passed this first round.

5. Your website lacks authority

Authority and topical authority are very important if you want to rank in the Google search results. If your website is all about dogs, it's pretty clear for Google that you have expertise in that area and that creates topical authority. As soon as you start writing about different topics, for instance about cake recipes, there is no relevance and therefore a lack of topical authority. That's the main reason why successful affiliate sites concentrate on one specific niche or super niche. It's much easier to gain authority on a specific topic instead of dozens of topics. That will help you rank a lot better and quicker.

A successful SEO strategy is aligned with ever-changing algorithms

In this blog post, we covered 5 of our clients most common causes of low SEO rankings. Does your keyword strategy needs to be updated? Or is your content simply not matching your visitors' search intent? Also be aware that there are other SEO ranking factors out there that could be preventing your website from ranking in Google in the future. For instance, we didn't even mention slow site speed, the Core Web Vitals, other technical issues on-page SEO, like meta descriptions and meta titles, and so on.

You can easily audit your website with the Ranktracker Audit and find technical issues.

After all, the algorithm of search engines is constantly changing. The key to successful digital marketing with SEO is to constantly look into your current SEO strategy and update it whenever necessary. You need to continually adapt to create a comprehensive content strategy that aligns with Google's algorithm. Quality content is still king!