Why are your efforts to rank your site high and get more visitors not paying off? Must be because something is wrong. You need to figure out what was wrong. Here’s a rundown of the factors that impede a site from ranking high and getting decent traffic.

Audience demographics

Thanks to state-of-the-art web analytic tools, you can get ample demographic details of your target audience. The competitive edge doesn’t lie in there - it lies in making the best use of the details.

How’s that possible?

Don’t consider the details in isolation, look at the synergy. Demographic details in isolation can be misleading. For example, online advertising influences 18-25 year olds most. Since people from this age-group can’t spend too much, you might decide not to approach them to buy your expensive products.

Your analysis of the demographic details isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete because you didn’t consider your product. If you sell eye-catching jewellery or designer accessories, the female members of the said demographic group might break their piggy-banks to purchase them.

Indexing issues

Many indexing issues are easy to avoid. You just need to follow the guidelines, laid down by the Google Search Console. Let’s consider the recent guideline, which almost necessitates webmasters to unblock all JavaScript and CSS files in the robot.txt file because Google’s spiders cannot access them.

Google’s insistence is a part of the search giant’s all-out-war against spammy sites. Previously, webmasters used to misguide the crawlers by informing them the content on the site is above the fold, when in reality, it’s below the fold. There could be several other reasons behind Google not indexing a site. Neil Patel discussed many of them a year ago, and his discussion is still quite relevant.

A site hosted on Wordpress has greater chances of being deindexed. That’s because installing an SEO plugin might block all files in the /wp-admin/folder including JS and CSS ones.

Responsive web design

Mobile search is on Google’s radar for obvious reasons. If you want optimized results from your mobile search interface, then responsive web design is a must for you.

Responsive web design brings the desktop version close to the handheld version. Users don’t come across any disparity in content or navigation items between a desktop site and a mobile site. The platform might change, but the user-experience would remain intact.

Don’t get stuck with the basics of RWD though because its fluidic aspect requires evolution to accommodate the touch-based (contrary to hovering) and tap-based (contrary to clicking) inputs, which are intuitive. Keep experimenting with RWD and see the results.

Font selection

You might wonder why font selection is so important. It’s not important in terms of technicalities but in terms of lead generation and sales conversion because an attractive layout with the right fonts can help the site get an increased number of clicks and visits.

Which font should you select? Well, there are plenty of fonts to choose from and new fonts are arriving everyday. I don’t want to solicit any particular font, be it free or paid. What I can tell you is the font should be in tune with the latest minimalist design trends. The very first advantage of selecting a minimalist font is your site appears uncluttered to visitors.

Sites with minimalist fonts have a simplistic interface. They don’t have flashy images and multimedia content on them, which allows them to load faster.

Doorway page update

Google has released this update in April of this year. In the update, Google categorically explained how doorway pages can maximize a site’s search footprint. A doorway page is no different than other pages of the site - only it’s better optimized for the search engine against a few keywords.

Google is okay with sites having doorway pages, but not okay with sites, whose doorway pages are thin in content, and stuffed with keywords. When the update was released, Brian White of Google wrote “Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.”

Make sure your doorway pages have sufficient readable content on them and the keyword insertion is perfectly natural.

Follow the tips

Assuming you are not following the tips described above, I strongly recommend you to consider following them because they might be preventing your site from climbing up the ranking ladder. 

Image Courtesy: sosialmedia.az