A.) Your site speed is testing your visitor’s patience

That is not a game you are ever going to win. If someone clicks on your site and it does not load right away that person will bounce. Speed is one of the most important conversion factors.

The more elements on a page that need to load, the longer your users must wait. And you better not make them wait longer than 3 seconds.

Every 100 ms of page load time led to a one percent decrease in sales.

B.) Google can’t understand your content

The implementation of schema helps search engines understand your web pages much better, and create a more organized content database that helps keep track of your web pages, which helps improve user engagement.

C.) Site & content are not optimized

Search engine optimized content is one of the most important elements of SEO. It plays a vital role in determining who finds your website and what information they take away once they have landed there.

If you or your team creates content for your sites then you will never fully benefit from that hard work if every page you publish is not optimized.

That means the silo of your site needs to make sense. Your page needs the right titles, image tags, keywords & anchor text. The pages need to inter-link so that the most link juice props up the most important and searched for pages on your site.

It’s not just about the main keywords either; it’s also important to include terms related to the main terms people are searching for. These are called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords. They provide a kind of online word association to help Google know which results to show.

D.) It is built on an unstable foundation

Web designers are great at designing stuff. I’ve worked with many and have presented at numerous web agencies. This is what I’ve learned. They do not understand how to build a proper site. Most lack the most basic technical knowledge and although the websites look beautiful… their performance is below average.

This used to be ok when the online space did not have much competition. Now you are fighting with other very motivated site owners for traffic that is proven to convert. Do not let the visuals of your site distract you from it’s performance.

You need both.

E.) Mobile experience

The number of mobile searches is exploding. In fact, 58% of all searches in Google are now done from a mobile device.

To satisfy this need, Google has overhauled their entire algorithm to focus on mobile search. This was done via the Mobile-Friendly Update (which many called “Mobilegeddon”)

This update penalises sites that are not mobile-friendly (for searches performed on smartphones.)

Google’s entire algorithm is now “mobile-first”.

F.) You disregard your competition

Don’t you miss the days of the yellow pages… when all it took was one action per year to have the customers knocking on your doors every day.

These days if you’re not pro-active you will lose business. Your competition is spending money on content, seo, google places etc… and it is why they outrank you.

Forecast says SEO-related spending will be worth $80 billion by 2020

G.) HTTPs

This is straight from Google’s blog:

“… we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now, it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it …”

H.) You are breaking the rules

It could be that your content is over-optimized, the site has performance issues and delivers poor user performance, are missing key pages…etc

It’s widely believed that Google has 200+ ranking factors. This is sort of true. The caveat is that some factors automatically trigger others. There are no more than 20 factors that are super important and most are covered under this plan.

The only major one remaining is quality backlinks from other web sites but that is a completely different type of SEO.

I.) You are missing key content

This is very common. You’re a lawyer who wants to rank for “personal injury claims” or an influencer who wants to rank for “social media expert” but do not have the content to back it up.

Let’s say you do have it on the site but Google can’t understand it and users have a bad experience when they visit. Not good. We can fix that.