Most websites are designed to
promote a business online. It is the best way to receive online visitors where
a business will benefit in the long run. Also, having website for companies has
become mandatory in the modern way of marketing as websites are the primary key
to succeed in online competition.
Obviously, in order for a
website to outmatch its competitors in its industry, it should first RANK well
in SERPs. However, there are some websites that don't seem to have a
competitive position in SERPs which could lead to losing a lot of potential
customers in the future.
Probably, there are some
important areas that you must investigate and research that might be affecting
your website to perform well on the internet and these could be:
Market competition - This could the reason why a website is not ranking well in SERPs.
For any industry, there are always a lot of websites competing to each other
just to be visible in first page of SERPs. But in order for a website to
standout in this phase of online marketing, you must not immediately target the
crowded areas of your industry. Do not attempt to compete with short tail
phrases to drive traffic to your website. Since there is already an existing
competition, it would be pain in the neck for a cat to jump into the cage of
lions and tigers and escape without having any strategies.
Keyword Research - The main key to succeed in promoting a website is to have the right
list of keywords that you will use to make your website rank and visible in
SERPs. Do not attempt to target keyword phrases with low search volume as this
will not pay off your efforts but don't target the high search volume keyword
phrases as this will be difficult for your website to rank in SERPs as well.
The only thing that you could do is to aim for medium competition and generate
a list of keywords that you will be using in the long run to help your website
rank.
Website crawlability - One of the most important factors that you should check is to make
sure that your website crawlability rate is 100%. Of course, your website will
not rank in SERPs well if there are pages on your website that cannot be
indexed by spiders. Since the most recommended format for websites that are
recommended by search engines is in HTML format as it is search engine friendly
and easy to discover by crawlers.
Avoid using javascript, flash,
and iFrame as this will make your website take time to load quickly compare to
websites built in HTML format only.
Link Profile - Analyze what your links are and where your links is coming from.
You need to make sure that your website has a very clean link profile as this
is the most important when positioning a website in SERP. Avoid buying links
from websites that are selling paid links to pass link juice, avoid linking
your website to adult and irrelevant websites as this is considered as a
serious violation in search engines guidelines which can result to penalization
of a website. Also, analyze the amount of your inbound links as this could
affect your website SERP in the long run. Remember that quality is much better
than quantity and if you have poor quality but high in quantity inbound links;
it might affect your SERPs as well.
Violations - Investigate some violations that your website may have committed.
Look for hidden links, cloaking, keyword stuffing, missing Meta Data and more.
Having at least one of the serious violations listed above could damage your
website performance and may affect your SERP in the long run which can result to
losing you potential clients. For more information about search engine
guidelines, you can visit their support page.
In the modern world of digital marketing having your website visible in search engines is definitely a good
result of your marketing efforts. Just keep in mind that you must analyze how
much is the competition in your industry so you could scale how much effort and
dedication that you must take to make your website rank in SERPs.
Joseph Gojo Cruz is the author of RankingElite, a Philippine-based Online Marketing
blog. Joseph has been working in SEO industry for over 3 years from website audit, link and content development, social media and search
engine optimization. Connect with Joseph on Google+, Twitter,
and Facebook. Joseph is also a contributor
on SEJ
and Ahrefs.
