5 Reasons Why You’re Not Ranking on SERPs

Search engine optimization (SEO) earns the most traffic for many of our Affiliates, among all other digital marketing channels available. Despite the fact that there are millions of similar landing pages and websites within the same niche, the demand for financial services is so high that many Affiliates still benefit from simply optimizing their websites for Google and other respective search engines.

The overarching goal is to reach out to as many targeted visitors as possible by ranking high on the search engine results pages, or the SERPs. This is a digital marketing art that few have mastered, leaving the rest in complete darkness as to why they can’t seem to conquer SEO no matter how hard they try. If you relate to the latter, this article is for you. With years of Affiliate Marketing experience under our belts, we’ve compiled a list of patterns that we’ve noticed have worked against Affiliates rather than for them. If you’ve been trying to generate leads for some time but haven’t quite figured out the SEO tricks needed to get ahead in the industry, we’ll show you how. Keep reading!

Duplicate Content

Using duplicate content, whether from another website or from your own, puts you at risk for being penalized by Google and other search engines. Perhaps the reason why you’re not ranking despite having good quality content and a decent amount of backlinks is because you’re actually under Google’s penalization. Try getting rid of the duplicate content and submitting a new sitemap to Google so the crawlers can index your updated page.

Keyword Stuffing

Another big mistake that costs Affiliates their position on the SERPs rankings is keyword stuffing. Not only does stuffing keywords into your content lower readership value and increase your bounce rates, it also qualifies as an overly aggressive form of SEO marketing that should be avoided at all costs. When you first stuff your content with important keywords, you might find that you have better rankings for a little while. Then, it’s as if your website has suddenly been buried. That’s when you know that the crawlers have detected abnormal optimizations on your website and sent your SEO on a hiatus. Penalizations are temporary and fixable, but for those who depend on SEO for their traffic, these hits can be detrimental to their overall revenue. Avoid stuffing your pages with keywords and simply mention them naturally as they come up in writing.

Not Guest Posting

Perhaps another reason why you aren’t ranking as highly as you’d like is because you’re not guest posting enough, or simply aren’t getting enough backlinks (as the two are pretty much related). Backlinks allow search engines to evaluate your website’s overall value. If you have a lot of high quality backlinks, your website will look a lot more credible to the search engines, which will then grant you a higher spot in the results pages. The trouble with getting backlinks is that they’re typically merited, which means that you can only get them if your content is good enough. There are other ways around this, which many notable websites tend to take advantage of, but you can technically pay to have authoritative websites link to you as well. This is against Google’s rules, so we don’t advise you to do it. Still, you should work on getting as many high quality backlinks as you can. Avoid buying backlinks from scammy sources because they will only harm your rankings in the long run.

Slow Loading Website

Even if you think that you have the best content in the world, no amount of great content will be able to make up for a slow loading website. After all, your website speed enables visitors to read your content. If the page takes more than 3 seconds to load and frequently lags, visitors will be frustrated and leave your website, never to return again. Google knows this, too, so it prioritizes website loading speed as an important SEO ranking factor. It wants more people to use its search engine, so the top results all have to be of overall excellent quality. You can improve your website speed by limiting the amount of redirects, large HD images, and plugins that you have. A fast loading website is a user-friendly website, and user-friendly websites are high ranking.

Template is Not Mobile-Friendly

Another way to focus on the user and get your website favored by Google and other search engines is to make sure that you template is mobile-friendly. Mobile friendliness is no longer just an option, since Google has already begun penalizing websites with designs that aren’t mobile friendly. There are already more searches on mobile than there are on desktop, which means that your website will have no chance at competing with other websites if it’s not mobile-friendly. Make sure your call-to-actions, forms, and all are as easy to navigate on desktop as it is on mobile.

To get a personalized SEO analysis of your website, sign up as an Affiliate with Zero Parallel and speak to one of our industry experts today.