8 Signs Your Website Needs SEO Bad

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Every second, Google’s search engine processes nearly 40,000 searches. Of these, website links that appear in the first fold (typically the first five results) receive nearly 70% of the clicks.^[1]
Call it the excellent content quality of these top-rated pages or the short attention span of online skimmers. Users today have little or no patience to skim through many result pages to find what they are looking for.
So, what does this mean for your business?
There could be several reasons why your website doesn’t rank high on search engine result pages (SERP) compared to your competitors. For starters, your website is not SE-optimized.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a practice to make your website rank high on search engines. It helps to increase your site's visibility, especially for the keys that art to your business.
For instance, you entered ‘best pizza corner in New York’ in the search bar of a search engine, say Google or Bing. Complex algorithms will instantly search the engine’s enormous database and show pages that best chronologically match your entered keyword. Take a look!
On average, the first-page result has a click-through rate of about 31.7%.^[2] This percentage significantly drops with each successive result. Nearly 1% or fewer people click on results that appear on the second or consecutive pages.
The more you pay attention to your website’s SEO, the higher you will rank on SERP, and the right will be your conversion rate.
But, how to identify if your website is SE-optimized? We’ve compiled a list of 10 signs that your website needs SEO bad. Here, take a look!

8 Reasons Why Your Website Needs SEO Right Away

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1. There’s a Dip in Your Website Traffic

The first sign that shows your website needs some SEO fixes is when there’s a steady dip in your site-wide traffic.
So, you have to keep a tab on the website traffic every day through Google analytics or other SEO tools.
This is a serious concern. A sudden dip in website traffic means:

• Your site has outdated content that needs to be updated right away
• Some technical issues are making your website unusable for visitors
• Your site has violated the content quality guidelines as defined by the search engine(s)

But to solve these issues, it is important to have a strong understanding of SEO.
Luckily, many SEO companies with qualified specialists can help you analyze your website's performance and identify issues. They are also well equipped to solve these problems, return the lost traffic, and even get more visitors than before.

2. Your Site Has a High Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your site but leave after viewing not more than one page. Knowing your site’s bounce rate can significantly help determine whether your site is capable enough to engage visitors.
It’s believed that a bounce rate of below 30% is considered acceptable.
While every site has some bounce range level, a considerably high bounce rate is a sign of many issues. These issues include, but are not limited to the following:

• Slow page load speed
• Broken navigation bar
• Misleading title tags or descriptions
• Bad UI/UX
• Bad links from another website
• Low quality or under-optimized content
• The site is not mobile-friendly

Such issues prevent visitors from interacting with your site and convert into customers. However, you can fix these issues with the help of some smart SEO tips and tricks.

3. Your Competitors Rank Higher on SERP

Finding that your competitors are ranking higher than you on the SERP despite your putting in many marketing efforts is highly disappointing. This is a prominent sign that your site needs SEO help immediately.
Ranking well and high on search engines is largely a combination of two components:

• Authority
• Relevance

If your site has good authority and provides relevant content, search engines will appreciate your efforts and put your content higher on their respective platforms. If not, then your competitors will surpass you on SERP.
SEO helps establish a strong foundation of your website on the internet. It provides a clean and effective user experience that makes your business easily visible in search. Besides these, authority is built over time as a result of the following SEO work:

• Adding quality backlink profiles
• Providing a positive user experience
• Using machine learning signals
• Optimizing on-page elements and content.

4. High Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

No one wants to spend a high cost to acquire new customers or to retain the old ones.
Not all companies will have the budget to spend on paid marketing to acquire customers with low CAC, thus SEO is considered the best to reap benefits keeping the CAC low.
The best way to maintain a steady and worthy CAC is by building a good SEO strategy.

• Add quality content on your website related to the keywords that your visitors search
• Play with your site’s design and make It more engaging
• Build strong Google ad campaigns that attract traffic to your site

Note, content that resonates with what your customers are looking for will automatically increase traffic on your site. This will, in turn, increase your conversion rate and also reduce the customer acquisition rate.
Quality SEO has the power to eliminate the need to run high-paid ads on Google and save businesses a huge cost.

5. Your Website Is Not Mobile Responsive

As per Smart Insights, nearly 81% of individuals use mobile devices to search for products or services online.^[3] This means that if your site is mobile responsive, you will likely get more traffic and conversions than a non-responsive mobile site.
Check your website’s mobile responsiveness often and fix the issues, if there any.
A mobile responsive site automatically optimizes your site’s design to fit the desired screen size. This also makes your content more consumable and likable. As visible in the image above, a responsive site will:

• Attract a wider audience base
• Make your site’s content and message prominently visible
• Be easier to maintain
• Lower bounce rate
• Improve conversion rate

SEO not only makes your site mobile-responsive but helps achieve all of the points mentioned above.

6. Your Website Has Washed out Content

A key component of successful search marketing is to have high-quality audience-focused content on your website. And SEO makes that possible. SEO helps to find and embed the right keywords in your content and make it widely popular on the internet.
Thin and washed-out content makes your site outdated and loses its credibility in the eyes of search engines.
If you wonder what is thin content, then it may involve any of these:
The more relevant keywords your content has, the higher are its chances of ranking high on SERP. Good and relevant content also aids in building website authority.
However, keep in mind that stuffing keywords in your content is a bad practice. Use keywords to make sense and answer all the questions your visitors came looking for on your site.

7. Your Website Has Many 404 Error Pages

404 error pages are the ones that appear when a link is either moved or deleted from a website.
It’s vital to pull out each broken link on your website and fix it without delay.
Too many 404 error pages means bad user experience and a high drop-off rate. They are annoying, frustrating, and disturbs a visitor's navigation flow.
Even search engines, including Google, do not like 404 error pages. They depict that a website pays the least attention to its maintenance.

• SEO helps identify such pages and fix the errors. It helps:
• Redirect 404 error pages to other relevant pages
• Restore the pages (if there is still demand these pages on the internet)
• Correct the broken links
• Create a good-looking and engaging 404 error page that makes sure no visit gets wasted.

8. Your Website Doesn’t Have an Effective Marketing Strategy

Having an effective online marketing strategy can make all your SEO mentioned above efforts successful. It is not important to have a comprehensively built marketing strategy but to have answers to basic questions that make your business flourish online.
First and foremost, analyze if you’re following prime aspects of online marketing such as creating content, producing images, videos, building backlinks, etc.
Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the ultimate aim of your website?
• What do you want your visitors to do when they land on your website?
• Does your site’s current user experience have the potential to make visitors take the desired action(s)?
• How do you plan to get more traffic to your website?

A good marketing strategy is one that:

• pays attention to website design
• regularly adds relevant blogs on the website
• builds social presence
• manages brand reputation, and
• invests in the right SEO strategies

If you can master even half of these things, your business will start growing at an exponential rate.

Relevant : Impact of Bad SEO on Your Business Brand Reputation

Frequently Asked Questions

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1. Does My Business Need SEO?

Yes. Every business in today’s time should invest in good SEO practices. Search engine optimization is an excellent way to organically increase traffic on your website, maintain its hygiene, keep it updated, and convert visitors into paying customers.
If your website isn’t getting expected impressions and clicks on the SERP, your business needs SEO.
Besides these, SEO also helps:

• Make your products and services visible to people on search engines
• Break into new markets
• Attract quality traffic
• Convert more traffic into paying customers
• Increase leads and sales
• Build trust and credibility
• Increase brand’s awareness and equity
• Influence purchasing decision
• Integrate all online marketing platforms

Using techniques like pay-per-click (PPC) ads is an expensive affair. It does not even have long-term benefits. On the other hand, organic SEO listings get 90% more clicks than paid ones.^[4] They also stay on SERP longer than PPC ads.

2. How Does SEO Work?

Essentially, SEO is a technique to optimize your website and make it rank higher on search engine result pages. But how does that exactly work?
Google uses nearly 200 ranking factors to analyze a website and check its relevance and authority. Based on these factors, it then decides which web pages should rank higher on their platform.
Google makes sure that the most relevant links from most trustworthy sources rank higher on its platform. This will help users find answers to their questions quickly.
To succeed at SEO, make sure your content is most relevant to keywords searched by your target audience on search engines. For instance, if your website is all about homemade chocolates, then find keywords that match homemade chocolates and post relevant content on your site.

3. How to Find Keywords That Visitors Are Searching to Find My Business Online?

Many tools help you find the right keywords. For instance, you can use Google’s keyword planner, SEMRush keyword magic tool, or Word Tracker.
Login to the tool and enter the keyword or phrase visitors will most likely use to find your business online.

“Refer to the image above.” It also lets you choose the keywords location wise based on your target audience. The tool will then load a whole list of relevant keyword suggestions for you. You can also see their monthly search volume, historical trend, competition, pages featuring the particular keyword, and so on. Refer to the image above.
You can then use these insights to prepare an informed SEO strategy and create related content.

Related : Frequently Asked Questions about Keywords and SEO

4. How Long Does It Take to Rank on Google?

Usually, it takes at least two to three months for SEO to show its results on search engine result pages. However, it depends on the keyword(s) that you are targeting. Some keywords show faster results than others.
For example, it may take less time to rank for a local term such as best plumbing company in New Jersey, compared to iPhone 12 or homemade cookies.

5. How Can I Improve My Website’s Relevancy?

There’s a long list of things you need to do to build your site’s relevance on Google. To start with, you need to:

• Identify the right keywords for each of your site’s pages
• Update basic page elements to make it search-friendly

• Title tags
• Header tags
• Meta description
• Alt text
• Inlinks

• Set up a proper site structure that helps search engines to understand better what your website is about
  Ensure the site structure has proper sitelinks which appear as main pages on search results along with the main page.
  
• Improve your content quality and add relevant keywords
• Rectify 404 errors and 301 redirects
• Remove duplicate content from your site
• Improve your site’s speed
• Make it mobile-friendly

6. What Parts of SEO Should I Focus on First?

It is fairly difficult to know that. Our advice should be to help an SEO expert identify the parts that you should focus on first. However, as a rule of thumb, check your site’s domain authority.
If it is less than 40, focus on building that first. Get more reputable websites to link to you. On the other hand, if your domain authority is more than 70, focus on building your site’s relevance.
Create an optimal number of internal links, perform keyword research, and optimize your content with trending keywords.
If your site falls between 40 and 70, your focus should be to study your competitors' domain authority. If their domain authority is less than yours, then focus your energy on building relevancy. Meanwhile, if your domain authority is less than theirs, then focus on building your authority online.

7. Should I Run PPC Ads, Do SEO, or Both?

This is an age-old debate. In an ideal scenario, you should create a balance between the two marketing channels. This would help avoid relying on one single source of traffic generation on your website. If you have restricted business funds,start with SEO and gradually move on to running PPC ads in parallel.

8. What Is the Difference Between Technical SEO and On-Page SEO?

Most people think that technical SEO and on-page SEO are the same things. But, they are quite different. Here is a table of differences for better understanding.

On-page SEO is the first step to website optimization. Once done, then technical SEO comes into play. Technical SEO is all about how a search engine will crawl, index your site, and help it rank higher. Drop your details here to get started.