Common reasons for SEO to fail

Here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and content marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester. And this is our guide to everything you should know about the most common reasons for SEO to fail.

What are the most common reasons for SEO to fail?

There are a number of reasons why for some companies, the SEO strategy and techniques simply do not pay off. The most common reasons include:

• Using outdated SEO practices- Like all things related to digital marketing, and web design, trends and developments are always ongoing. Over time, different SEO practices become less and less useful or relevant until they are considered obsolete. Some of these SEO practices include:
  • Keyword stuffing- this is the practice of adding as many repeated keywords as you can to your content, or repeating the primary keyword repeatedly, squeezing this in where it doesn’t fit. This is considered poor practice by Google and other search algorithms, and it will usually have the opposite effect than intended, pushing your content off the front of the results pages.
  • Buying links- once upon a time, it was routine practice to quickly pay to get a high volume of links pointing at your site. This is not a practice that works any longer, and is actually considered bad practice. As a result, using this technique is sure to hold your website back.
• Search Engine Results Page (SERP) design- the design of the SERP differs depending on the nature and the intent of the search. If the SEO is aiming to target keywords and searches related to location, or those that are very popular, it can be very difficult to achieve the desired result. This is because the organic results will be shown further down the page, with other content right at the top, grabbing the interest of any interested searchers, and diluting the volume of traffic to your website. Even if you seize the number one spot, the amount of traffic will be significantly less compared to the traffic to ads, or maps or whatever content Google is displaying at the top of the page, and compared to other number one ranking spots you might have. The search features on the results page can easily work against companies, and prevent SEO strategies from reaching target traffic numbers.
• Poor UX design- for some websites, it’s not all about the traffic. Instead SEO strategies are developed to increase conversions, and boost sales, bookings or sign ups. But while high quality SEO can ensure that your website ranks highly for the relevant keywords, and does direct a lot of traffic, if the UX design of the website is poor, your website users will leave, and not convert to paying customers or clients. This will leave your website with a high bounce rate, that is significantly skewed because of the high amount of traffic. As a result, this will indicate to search engines that your website is not high quality, or not relevant to the search term, and your website will move down the page results.

For help or advice with any of these aspects of web marketing and SEO, why not ask the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design?