Critical Reasons Your Organic SEO Efforts Are Failing

Digital, Services

Are you noticing your content efforts missing the mark even with a seemingly comprehensive SEO strategy? With so many small details that could go askew, getting to the bottom of the problem can seem daunting. As fellow marketers, the Full Spectrum Marketing team knows you’re busy. That’s why our team of Digital Marketing experts has compiled a list of potential Content SEO issues – so you can make improvements faster!

What Is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is the production of content (articles, blogs, web pages, etc.) with the goal of high rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The goal is to create pages that are visible to your target audience. To make it a bit more practical – we used specific keywords in this article so that when you Googled something like, “how to research target audience,” this blog will (hopefully) show up as one of your first results!

SEO targeting involves paying attention to researched keywords that are relevant to your target audience, website structure, and copywriting. Producing content SEO that ranks well is crucial for your website’s visibility and market authority.

7 Reasons Your SEO Efforts Aren’t Reaching The Right Audience

While most professionals understand that Organic SEO is fundamental to any marketing plan, getting your content to the right audience can be difficult. Whether you’re misunderstanding your audience’s needs or there is an unknown issue with your website’s hosting provider, one small misalignment can tarnish your efforts. Before starting from square one, take a look at some possible missteps below. Your solution might be easier to fix than you think!

1. Misaligning Content with Audience Needs

All marketing begins with a solid understanding of your target audience. What are the demographics of your audience, and how do they search the internet? Your younger customers are using search engines differently than your older customers – so make sure your keywords represent that variation. If you’re not sure where to start, there are plenty of target audience tools on the market to give you the insights you need. FSM utilizes Google Analytics, SemRush, IBISWorld, and more to perform audience research.

2. Not Using The Right Keywords

Next, revisit the keywords you’ve been using and ask yourself these questions:

  • Are you using single keywords or long-tail keywords?
    Shoot for long-tail keywords over single keywords. This might look like targeting “ad agencies in akron ohio” instead of “ad agency.”
  • Are you targeting super specific keywords?
    Getting too specific with your keywords can cause decreased traffic to your website. Even if you work in a niche market, try to keep your keywords practical.
  • Are you working with broad reaching keywords?
    On the other hand, working with broad keywords can also cause issues. You might be too broad if you’re targeting “digital marketing” instead of “paid search engine marketing.”

Working with the right keywords is all about balance and understanding your audience. When you know your market and how your audience searches, you can find keywords that drive traffic to your page.

3. Not Utilizing Search Intent

A key to understanding your audience is utilizing search intent. This means knowing more than what your audience is searching for, but also why they are searching for it. When you understand the “why” behind your audience’s search, you can build a relevant content strategy that targets the correct audience. If you skip this step, you could end up in the wrong audience’s search results, resulting in a high bounce rate and decreased organic rankings.

Keep in mind that there are four types of user intent:

  1. Informational: When a user is searching for information. For example, “how to find demographics of a website”.
  2. Navigational: When a user is looking for a specific website or webpage. For example, “Full Spectrum Marketing website”.
  3. Transactional: When a user is ready to buy a product or pay for a service. For example, an Akron business that needs marketing support searches, “advertising agencies near me”.
  4. Commercial: When a user is doing market research. For example, they are comparing two different ”ad agencies in Ohio”.

4. Your Content Isn’t Useful

Stay innovative when brainstorming content ideas. Search engines favor new and useful ideas – so if you’re repeating what everyone else is doing, you won’t rank well against the competition. Continue learning about your target audience to understand what is truly useful to them. Study your competitors and identify gaps in their content, then develop unique variations of that content on your own website to better address those gaps.

Remember that users are on search engines to find answers. Make sure your content is useful in answering their questions!

5. Poor Technical SEO

It’s time to get technical. Without going into too much detail – poor technical SEO can impact your content strategy & performance. A website with poor technical SEO may have slow load speed, long crawl depth, bad indexability, or web pages that aren’t optimized for mobile devices. These factors negatively impact your site’s organic ranking.

If you fear your website has poor technical SEO, perform an SEO audit so you know where areas need improvement.

6. Lack of Quality Linking Structure

The quality of your linking structure significantly impacts how your website is perceived by search engines and their users. Maintaining strong internal links, external links, and backlinks leads to better rankings because search engines understand which pages are important and trustworthy. Overall, this leads to improved user experience and higher search engine visibility.

Internal Links

One way of building a quality linking structure is to use internal links to your advantage. This means you would link to other pages on your website throughout your SEO content. This might look like a FSM team member writing SEO content about social media strategy and linking to our social media marketing page or existing relevant blogs.

External Links

An important part of a superior SEO strategy should be maintaining strong external links throughout your page. This means that you need to include links to other authoritative pages that are relevant to your audience.

Make sure you are directing your audience to high-traffic sites with a clean link profile. For a digital marketing agency, this might look like linking to relevant tools such as Agorapulse for social media marketing or WP Engine for website hosting.

Backlinks

A backlink is when another website links back to your website. For example, if FSM hosted a SEO targeting webinar with Search Engine Land, their event posting would link back to our website. This SEO best practice leads to higher rankings and more website traffic.

7. Unstable Web Hosting Provider

If your web hosting provider is unstable, search engines won’t trust your website. An unreliable web host tells search engines that your website is not credible and unstable. If you notice your hosting platform is unreliable, switch to a different provider. Additionally, be sure to review the features and services of any hosting service moving forward. They might just make or break the ranking of your website!

Improve Your SEO Efforts With Full Spectrum Marketing

Feeling overwhelmed by the seven steps listed above? Let the expert digital marketing team at Full Spectrum Marketing take care of your SEO strategy and content for you. From audience research and content strategy to technical SEO and website hosting – we can handle it all. Our goal is to be the most valuable marketing partner you will ever have. Contact us today to learn how we can support you.

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