Reasons Why Your Website is Not Ranking on Search Engines

Ranking on search engines or getting your site to be the one that's most likely to show up when someone searches for a particular phrase is the ultimate goal when it comes to building and maintaining a website.
If you can get your website ranked well, you'll increase more traffic, convert more traffic into leads or sales and become a go-to place for people who are looking for what you offer.

However, ranking a website is not a piece of cake. We’ve all been there, we start a new website and put our heart and soul into it. We create excellent content, attractive imagery, and optimize content to perfection but the website isn’t ranking. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
In this blog, I will be looking at the top 10 reasons why your website is not rankingand what you can do to fix it.

1. Slow website speed

A slow loading website is much less likely to rank. It is the single most important factor that, for some reason, gets overlooked. People tend to build a nice looking website with a lot of graphics and videos which leads to a website that doesn’t load as fast as it should.
On average, websites take around 5 seconds to load. The issue is that visitors, on average, stay only for 3 seconds and then leave if the website doesn’t load. This increases the bounce rate and that leads to a website not ranking fast.
A slow loading website means people are not sticking around to look at what you offer. That means fewer people knowing about your offerings and eventually less business. So, a heavy website that has everything but loads slowly will do more harm than good.
Solution:
SEO companies in Dubai and around the world suggest that you take a website’s loading speed seriously and you should make sure that your website is loading as fast as it can. As aforementioned, if it doesn’t load fast, people are not going to wait and they will quickly bounce away. You don’t want that, do you?
First of all, you’ll have to check your website’s loading speed to get an idea of where you are. You can do this using a tool. There are multiple free tools available out there to check your website’s loading speed. People mostly use Google Page Speed Insights, mobile speed test from Google, GTMetrix or you can also run a domain report using a free SEMrush trial.

2. Your content is not trustworthy enough

One reason why your website is not ranking is because people aren't reading your content and they're bouncing off your website. In fact, only 6 percent of people will read a piece of online content from start to finish. The reason is that when visitors land on a website, they expect to get honest answers to their queries.
If your content is all about sales pitches and about why your business is the best. That won’t cut it. Buyers nowadays are smart enough to make an opinion about a business with a glance at its website.
Solution:
Your content needs to be intriguing, credible, and trustworthy. You need to effectively communicate and give people a reason not to bounce off your website. Make them feel heard and informed so that they stick around.
Go through your blog content. Even if you are frequently, if your blogs are just talking about how good you are at what you do and why people should hire you, it’s not going to help. You need to focus on giving value to the readers and answering their questions.
Moreover, it’s not just about what you’re writing about but it's also about how you’re writing it. Make sure that your content is precise and readable so that visitors can easily browse through it. This will eventually make people stay longer on your website. It will also help rank your pages for different search queries, and your website’s ranking will eventually increase.

3. You’re not targeting the right keywords

If your content is not answering specific queries, you’ll definitely have a hard time ranking your website. Your content needs to be focused on answering what people are asking, that’s the whole idea behind search engines. If that’s not happing, no matter how good your content is, it won’t rank.
It's not only for blogs but it’s also the same for your website’s primary pages. Most of the websites are full of generic industry jargon and content that is not adding value to the readers.
This is the reason why most of the websites don’t rank. It’s simply because they don’t have what the users are looking for.
Solution:
There is much to be done on the SEO front but keep this mantra in mind while writing content, your content should be based on search terms and the user’s queries. It should be written while keeping in mind both users and the search engines.
To achieve this, you’ll have to do thorough keyword research. Try figuring out what people are searching for and the questions they’re asking. Once that is done, focus on answering those questions and be sure to strategically spread popular search terms throughout your content.

4. You’re not publishing regularly

There is no doubt that you need to upload quality content and if your content is not up to the mark, it won’t help your rankings. However, that’s not the only thing you should take care of. You also need to keep a strict posting schedule because frequent posting helps rank better.
If you don’t upload new content often, Google perceives your content to be outdated and Google crawlers stop crawling your websites frequently. This results in a loss of ranking. Moreover, it takes your website out of the sight of users, even those who have been visiting your website frequently in the past.
It usually happens because people, more often than not, don’t find time to create new content. It is indeed a hefty task and most business owners are always preoccupied with other tasks that they tend to neglect this important aspect.
Solution:
Creating and uploading fresh content regularly will send a message to the search engines that your website is a source of valuable and updated information. Search engine crawlers will start visiting your website more often and this will result in more of your pages getting indexed and you will eventually gain rankings.
Now how do you do that? The best way to do it is to schedule posts beforehand. You should create content at once whenever you find time and then schedule posts according to your content calendar.
It is indeed not easy but it is the only way to keep up with it. Not everybody can dedicate time to writing fresh content every day so the best way is to write content beforehand and schedule posts so that your website gets new content in intervals.If you follow a calendar and continue posting regularly, you’ll notice your rankings increase slowly but surely.

5. Your website's navigation is poor

Search engines will penalize your website because it has poor navigation. Search engines don’t like websites with bad navigation because it can lead to website users experiencing frustrations due to the difficulty involved in finding information on the website.
That said, it’s not always the easiest task to create a good user experience and make sure your site is friendly for Google crawlers. Most of the websites aren’t and this is the reason why these websites don’t get ranked.
Moreover, if your website’s navigation is complicated and users are not easily finding their way around the website, they tend to bounce away and increased bounce rates are bad for a website’s ranking as well.

Solution:
The only solution to this problem is to revamp your website’s navigation. Spend some time on the website and browse through it, if you’re finding it hard to find different pages that you’re looking for, that means it’s high time you restructure your website.
Make sure that users don’t have to give additional thought to browse through your website, even the blog section. Make it as easier for them to navigate as possible. This will enhance the user experience and will lead to people staying on your website for longer and it will eventually lead to decreased bounce rates and increased search engine rankings.

6. There is a no-index tag set on your web pages

A no-index tag, simply put, asks the search engine crawlers not to crawl specific web pages. It is a useful tool and is needed for some specific pages. For example, a website’s ‘thank you’ pages don’t need to be indexed so a ‘no-index’ tag is used.
However, sometimes it so happens that there is a no-index tag set for pages that shouldn’t have it. You might have placed it while developing a new page or while working on it and then forgot to remove it. It happens more often than one would think and it surely hinders your web pages from ranking.
Solution:
You should check all your pages and remove the no-index meta tag if it’s placed that. It should only be used on specific pages that you actually don’t want to rank.
There are different ways of finding out if there is a no-index attribute placed on a web page. You can use different free software to figure it out as well. You will have to go into the backend of the CMS and remove the tag from there.
Ranking your website on search engines is the ultimate goal of any website owner and it is indeed a hefty task. It takes a huge amount of effort to get a website to rank in SERPs and it involves search engine optimization as well as development work.
All your hard work can go in vain if you are making these mistakes while trying to rank your website. Make sure you’re following the SEO best practices and your website is as user friendly as it can get. It is a time taking process but continuous optimizing will eventually lead to your website getting ranked so keep putting in that hard work and don’t make the aforementioned mistakes.

This is it for today’s blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Be sure to share your comments with me and share the blog with your friends so they could also learn. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
If you are a business owner and you want your website to rank high on search engines, contact Prism Digital, the best SEO agency in Dubai and our SEO experts will help you create tailored SEO strategies that would help rank your website and put it in front of the potential clients who are looking for your services. See you on the other side. Thank you.