Can't explain why you're not ranking #1 for your focus keywords in Google? You may be making one of the mistakes that many website owners make. It happens a lot. From small local businesses to large corporations, many website owners make similar mistakes.
You may not be paying attention to the page speed
The first common SEO mistake is the Website speed. The faster your website is, the more Google will favour it. Especially now that the ranking factor for user experience is slowly being introduced. It is important to work on the speed of your website to keep your pages in the search results.
Furthermore, the loading times of the existing images must be optimised. Many websites have a relatively large number of images that take a long time to load. This makes your website slower than it should be. Resizing your images can speed up the loading time. If you have a WordPress site, you can do this easily by installing a plugin that does this for you, e.g. Imagify (https://wordpress.org/plugins/imagify/).
With a WordPress installation, we also recommend taking a look at the activated plugins. Are you really using all the plugins? Maybe some of them can be replaced by another plugin that combines these functions? In this context, less is more! The fewer plugins are activated, the faster your WordPress site can load!
Read the following articles on page speed:
You are trying to rank for the wrong keywords
If you want to rank on Google, you need to make sure that each page is optimised for one keyword. One of the biggest mistakes we often encounter is that website owners optimise their pages for general and for multiple keywords. They can also go for long tail keywords.
The longer and more specific the keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for that keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword is lower. However, you can compensate for this by optimising many pages of your website for different long-tail keywords. Your website will eventually gain more traffic for all these keywords together than it ever would if you were optimised for a main keyword for which your page never ranks on page 1 in Google.
You can also read the following post on this topic:
Attention: important keywords! Is this what is being searched for?
You forget to invite visitors to visit your website
Metadata is what is displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) when a website is accessed for specific search queries. It contains the title of your page and its meta description. The page title is still an important ranking factor for Google, so you need to make sure it is properly optimised for each page. We recommend adding your keyword to the title if possible and making sure your page title is not too long. If your page title is too long, it will be cut off. You don't want potential visitors to only see half of your page title in the search results.
The meta description is not a ranking factorbut plays an important role in your click-through rate (CTR). The CTR tells you how likely it is that potential visitors will click on your website in the SERPs. If you optimise your meta descriptions with a clear and attractive message about what people can find on your website, they can more easily see if the information they are looking for is on that page. The more likely people are to believe that your website provides an answer to their search query, the more traffic a page will receive.
You neglect writing unique content
It is important that each page of your website has engaging content that is at least 300 words. Google needs enough input to find out what your page is about and whether you can provide the answer people are looking for. You cannot expect Google to see you as an expert on a particular topic if you have only written two sentences about it. This indicates to Google that your page is probably not the best result for the search query.
But: Remember that Google is NOT your target group. You need to write for your visitors, not just for Google. Google's mission is to organise the world's information and provide the best possible answers. Therefore, writing quality content for your audience is the way to go. Even when it comes to SEO and ranking well on Google. Writing high-quality content means writing original content that shows your expertise. And don't just stuff keywords into your text, those days are long gone. Your text must be easy to read for your visitor.
You neglect to consider the dwell time of website visitors
Once visitors land on your website, the next goal is to keep them on your website. You don't want your visitors to return to Google immediately after reading something on your site. For this reason, you need to encourage visitors to click through to your website. The best way to do this is to create a call-to-action (CTA), which is usually a button that offers your visitor an action. For example, this could be a "buy" button on a product page or a "sign up" button for the newsletter. Don't overdo it and try to have one main CTA that stands out from the rest of your page.
Another way to keep people on your website is to add relevant internal links to other pages on your website. This is actually also an important part of SEO and should be part of your marketing efforts. Adding internal links lets your website visitors and Google know which pages are connected and can be interesting when they are looking for information on a particular topic. So take time with your internal linking to create a great page structure that keeps people on your website!
You choose the wrong web hoster
What is the right and what is the wrong web host? Actually, this question is not correct. Alternative question: What is an expedient web host? Quite simple: a fast web hoster. Furthermore, it should have DDoS attacks preventively in its programme.
In any case, the cheapest web host is definitely the wrong web host.
What should your website be able to do? How many additional programmes are called up when your website is called up? What is the loading time of these programmes? These are the essential questions by which you should choose a web host. The answer is: it definitely won't be the cheapest web host.
Read also
WordPress: fast hosting with CDN (=Content Delivery Network)
Do not think further
The sixth and final SEO mistake, which is quite common, is not going mobile-first. In 2018, Google switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google now looks at the mobile version of your website to decide how high you should rank. So if the desktop version of your website is set up brilliantly, but your mobile website is not responsive at all, this will be reflected in your rankings. In a negative way. So if this is the case, you should definitely work on mobile SEO!
A good way to test whether your website is optimised for mobile devices is to use Google's mobile device test. This gives you an indication of how easily visitors can use your site on mobile devices. But don't stop after you have checked this. The best advice we can give is to visit your site on your own mobile phone. Browse your own site for a while and try clicking on every button, link and image to see what happens. Does everything work as it should? How easy is it to buy something on your website while using your mobile phone? Are all the pages displayed correctly? Mobile usage is on the rise and will continue to rise, so don't miss out on all those mobile users and create a great user experience on mobile devices.
Conclusion
SEO means a lot of work. And also that it's not easy to remember all the different components you have to work on. But it is important to do this regularly.
