SEO Not Working: Here’s Why

Lately I’ve been getting on more and more calls lately with people saying something along the lines of “we’ve been doing SEO or inbound for 6 months, 12 months, or however long and we’re not seeing anything – we don’t want to do SEO or inbound stuff.

Reasons Why SEO Is Not Working

9 out of 10 times I hear this I open up the prospects domain in SEMRush and show them that they’ve essentially been wasting the last 6-12 months spending money on nothing that was ever going to work. In this post I’ll break down some of the most common reasons why SEO is not working for your business.

You’re Not Ranking For Anything

One of the most common reasons SEO is not working for a business is because they aren’t ranking for anything 0 keywords in the top 10, or maybe a handful of commercially irrelevant keywords that without marketing support from other channels such as retargeting campaigns, are never going to do anything for their business. SEO is never going to work for you if you are not ranking in the top 10 for a whole lot of keywords.

You’re Creating Social Media Content For SEO

Believe it or not a lot of companies like to hire marketers that are great at garnering attention on social media and put them in charge of the marketing department. What that usually results in is a marketing team that is creating SEO content about stuff that gets attention on social media, aka idealististic and utilitarian sentiments about how the world should be if resources were unlimited or how amazing the and sexy the writer is, or meme filled comedy pieces. While these causes are noble or entertaining and your blog content may even go viral on social media, they do not attract the right types of search engine traffic and you’ll find SEO is not working.

You’re Creating “Thought Leadership Content”

The other big mistake I see companies make is creating “thought leadership content” which is the type of content they see large companies with established audiences write about or the types of content they create on social media where an audience is intrinsically baked in. The reality is people are rarely searching for this type of content and it makes for very poor SEO content that get’s little to no traffic.

Marketer’s who come from a background in a successful company that was a sales driven company tend to want to create this type of content because they are used to feeding PDFs to a sales team instead of writing content designed to generate search engine traffic. A recipe for SEO not working.

You’re Blogging For Commercial Keywords

This is the number one mistake I see low quality agencies that actually do understand a little bit about SEO make. They create blog content targeting keywords that commercial landing pages should be targeting. When someone searches for “IT support services” or “crm software provider” or some other flavor of commercial keyword they are expecting to see a commercial landing page, not a blog post.

Impressions go up, maybe even clicks go up for a short period of time, but eventually Google or the search engine figures out that people are opening up the page, seeing a wall of text, and immediately bouncing. Their is an intent mismatch. Think about it like this – you are trying to buy a new pair of sneakers. You already know what shoes you want to buy and you search for “Brooks Glycerin running shoes.” Do you want to see a blog post about them or do you want to see Amazon and Dicks sporting goods results allowing you to quickly buy a pair.

Low budget agencies love to do this, because in reality it’s a lot easier and cheaper for them to create blog content at a price you’ll pay and game the numbers for 6-12 months, which is about how long it takes for the initial traffic surges to start collapsing and for your patience to expire. They churn and burn you and “go next” and you’re stuck with 6-12 month less marketing capital to spare and a domain full of blog content that needs to be deleted in order to do SEO right.

You’re SEO Content Is Low Quality

One of the less frequent reasons SEO may not be working is that your landing pages or your content is just low quality. You can drive all the traffic in the world to shit content, but they still have to convert when they get there or you’ll eventually find that SEO is not working.

You’re Not Incorporating Any Offers Or Ways To Convert

You’ve got the traffic, your content is high quality, the readers are engaged, but so what? WTF are they supposed to do when they get there? Most website’s are not adequately optimized for lead generation or conversion. They don’t have the right calls to action, or aren’t incorporating any lead magnets to capture leads for ongoing nurture. Landing pages need CTAs that are more bottom of funnel such as free consultations or demos booked, blog content needs softer conversions such as content downloads that are contextually appropriate. No offers, no leads.

Find Out Why Your SEO Is Not Working

There’s a lot of reasons your SEO may not be working, ranging from no rankings, to the wrong types of content, to low quality content, or a lack of offers and ways to convert. For personalized advice on why your SEO is not working reach out today and request a free SEO audit. Learn more about our search engine optimization services.