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It goes without saying that search engine optimization is one of the best ways to ensure that your website is visible to a large audience. Without SEO, you could have the world’s greatest website with plenty of useful content and products to sell, but you’re never going to get the exposure you deserve unless you make friends with search engines like Google. Every day, there are over 3.5 billion searches on Google alone which means 1.2 trillion searches a year–that’s a lot of internet users! And with more users making use of smartphones and tablets to browse the web, we’re going to see that number increase even more.

So we understand why SEO is important, but are you really taking advantage of it as much as you could? Perhaps you’ve invested in SEO heavily but you’re still not seeing a huge increase that the agency promised, or perhaps you’ve been fooled to think that SEO requires a hefty time investment. Of course, there’s always the alternate reason; your SEO is failing.

So in this article, we’re going to explain five reasons why your approach to SEO is failing and how you can fix it so that your website gets the exposure it deserves.

Reason 1: Your website just isn’t good enough

Your visitor experience plays a huge role in how visible your website is. If your visitors are required to click over 5 different links to find what they need then there’s a serious problem. You may want to consult website designers to help you with things such as improving your navigation and the overall design of your site needs to be easy on the eyes. If you’re not focusing on things such as readability, navigation or even having a website that works on both mobile and desktop, then you’re going to have some serious trouble with your SEO.

Think about it this way; it doesn’t matter how much Google likes your website thanks to your keyword usage and their robots. If your website isn’t an enjoyable experience then your visitors may click your website, but they certainly aren’t going to stay let alone actually purchase something from you. So if you’re serious about SEO and improving your website, make sure you focus on making a good website first.

Reason 2: You’ve not updated your SEO strategy

SEO is constantly evolving. If you hired an agency five years ago to help you with SEO and you’re still acting on the same principles, then it’s no wonder that your SEO is currently failing. You always want to update your tactics because Google is always updating its search engine. It’s always going to change its algorithm and you need to learn about those changes and discover how you can take advantage of it to grow your site.

The best way to do this would be to hire an SEO expert since they can keep up with all the updates, but you can also do this by taking SEO more seriously and learning about the processes involved.

Reason 3: You don’t have the right team for it

You also need to ensure that you have the right team for your SEO needs. It’s often a matter of hiring an in-house team vs hiring an SEO agency, and the right choice for you will often depend on how large your business is and how much attention your website gets. If you’re just a small business then an agency is usually good enough, but if your website has many products, pages and your company gets a lot of business, then it’s best to seek an in-house team that understands your business better.

Reason 4: Your industry is too competitive

If your industry is really competitive then you might just be having trouble trying to compete with the giants in your field. For example, you might be struggling to compete with other smartphone companies since Apple, Google and Samsung are currently dominating it. If you’re trying to grow a site about something popular such as video games or sports, then there are other websites that will likely have far better content than you and domain authority.

If your industry is competitive, then it may be worth trying to find your own niche, changing your goals or even repurposing your website so that it’s easier to find for a more specific or smaller audience before expanding your brand.

Reason 5: Your industry just isn’t very popular

There’s always going to be a problem with industries that just aren’t popular. While popular industries have the trouble of too much competition, niche industries might have too few searches or highly specialized businesses that are already well-known in communities.

When it comes to SEO for niche industries, you need to play an active role in those communities in order to promote your website. This involves content marketing, social media interaction and general engagement with your audience in order to grow your audience. In other words, you need to take a different approach to SEO if you want to grow your website in a niche industry.

Reason 6: You’re focusing too much on keywords

Lastly, we should talk about keyword usage and the technical side of SEO. While it’s true that Google does look at your website with a set of algorithms to determine its domain authority and value to users, it’s important to design your website to be readable by humans first and not Google’s bots. This means that you shouldn’t stuff your content with keywords or follow SEO optimization tools that use robots to check your content.

Instead, focus on creating content that is actually readable. Focus on designing a website that has lots of interesting content for your users to read and stop putting a heavy emphasis on meeting a certain keyword requirement. Yes, the statistics and analytics are important in SEO, but arguably the most important statistic is how many people visit and stay on your website, and that’s usually down to honest high-quality content.