Your website is ranked on search engines based on the sentiment towards the site and its relevance in relation to what users are searching for. Optimizing your site to fit these general criteria is an ongoing project, and PR pros provide the creative drive for SEO programs.
For all the planning, however, sometimes SEO strategies don't work. With so many moving parts, it can be hard to determine exactly where you have gone wrong. So what can you do when you have done your SEO homework but still aren't seeing the results you want?
During PR News’ SEO Workshop in New York City on Friday, Mike Samec, director of digital strategy at Gibbs & Soell, provided 5 reasons why your site may not have a high ranking on SEO:
- You have no content or the content you have lacks context. Text is still very important for SEO because images and videos are hard to define for search engines. Longer text has performed better in SEO recently than it has in the past few years.
- Your content lacks focus. How does a search engine know what you specialize in? With too much generalization, it becomes difficult for search engines to sort out where you should rank and under which keywords.
- Something's broken. Don't panic. The most obvious errors are a good place to start. Are your SEO widgets plugged in? Talk to your developers and IT staff to make sure everything is in working order.
- You took too many risks in your past. Your company may have hired an SEO agency in the past, and the work it did years ago might be out of date and could be penalizing your SEO status now. Undo the outdated work.
- You don't have enough signal strength. Despite the changes in the past few years, your site's ranking still depends on the volume of links on the Internet that lead back to your website. The quality of these links is going to matter more and more in the future.
Follow Mike Samec on Twitter: @msamec
Follow Brian Greene on Twitter: @bw_greene