There are things on your website that are sabotaging your web pages to rank on Google and get higher traffic.
No matter how much effort you put into writing content, optimizing your technical SEO, or building backlinks, they're going to keep you down.
In this article, we are going to share with you 8 things that you need to remove from your website immediately if you want to rank better on Google.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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1. Google prefers fresh content
According to Hosting Tribunal, there are over 1.7 billion websites in the world. Over 2 million blog posts are being published every single day.
Not only that, it's estimated that Google has over 63 billion pages indexed according to WorldWideWebSize.
So, instead of you thinking that you need to crank out a lot of content each and every single day, what we want you to do is to go to Google Search Console and look at all your pieces of content and the amount of traffic you're getting.
Now, in the date picker in Google Search Console, we want you to compare what your traffic is now versus the same time a year ago.
You may get more traffic or less traffic, but what you'll find is that some pages were doing well and aren't anymore.
We want you to look at those pages that were doing well and go and update them.
And by refreshing up, making them better, you're going to rank much better instead of taking your old content and just leaving it there.
Google wants all the content on your site to be great and updated because it's not just one page ranking on its own, it's your whole site.
Google is looking at your whole site as a whole, and when it's all buttoned up and perfect, you're going to do much better.
2. Thin content
The second thing that's hurting you is pages with thin content.
Back in the day, a 500word page was considered long-form content.
That was six years ago.
Today pages that don't go above and beyond and really dig deep won't do well.
For that reason, Google tends not to rank pages with thin content.
Now, if you can answer someone's question or query, whatever someone is searching for is usually a problem for them, in 200 words or 100 words, that's great, but most people can't.
These pages that offer little to no value don't do well.
So, what we want you to do is to go to all the pages that offer little to no value and look at them.
If you think they offer value, that's fine.
But if you don't, we want you to either update them and make them more in-depth, or redirect them to other better pages that are more in-depth and offer a much better user experience.
Make sure you assess each and every single page through Google Analytics.
Look at how much traffic it's getting before the change and after the change.
Look at the bounce rate, look at the time on the page.
These will all give you indicators if that page is good or bad or needs updating.
3. Excessive or irrelevant ads
The third thing that's hurting your Google rank is excessive or irrelevant ads.
When you put a lot of ads on your website, all it's doing is increasing the load time.
The more ads you put on your website, the more external resources that need to be loaded which will have a direct impact on your load time and your SEO.
Ads make users leave a website if they impact the user experience.
Just imagine yourself pulling up a site on a mobile device and all you're seeing is a ton of ads.
Even if it loads fast, it's hindering the user experience, isn’t it?
So, it isn’t bad to have ads, even Google has ads, but you want to make sure that they blend in, they're nice, they're not too crazy in how they look, and they're not distracting the user.
And if you look at what Google is doing with their ads, that's a perfect example of how ideal you want to blend ads throughout your own webpage.
4. Automatically generated content
The next thing that you want to look at if you want to rank on Google is automatically generated content.
Now, this probably doesn't come as a shocker, but Google wants you to deliver an amazing experience.
Creating content through automated tools is not going to deliver the best experience.
Even if you put in the time and effort to make that content a bit more customized and look personalized, it's still not going to do well.
What you need to do is create content that provides the best experience out there and not just from the perspective that is not automated, but you need to look for all the other pages that are ranking for the term that you're going after and be always wondering if your content is going to provide more value than the others.
And if you're unsure on how to evaluate that, you can use a tool named Ubersuggest, where you just type in the keyword that you're looking for to rank for and write about.
On the right side, you'll see all the pages that rank at the top, the backlinks they have, the social shares, and their domain score.
This will give you a good understanding of what users like as well as what Google likes because just because a site ranks number one or a page ranks number one, it's not always what users prefer.
So, having that social data and backlinking data will also give you a good understanding of what a good page is, and you can use that to come up with the best variation that's better than all your competitors.
Alright, now before we move on with the next things to remove from your website if you want to rank on Google, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
How much should you invest in a Digital Marketing Agency?
5. Intrusive popups
The next thing you need to stop doing is intrusive pop-ups or interstitials.
Google even said this on their Official Google Webmaster Central Blog "Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible."
Now that doesn't mean that you can't do popups, we use them, but typically you want to save the popups as an exit popup.
So, an exit popup is upon leaving, that's what people see versus upon entering.
And what you can do is that if you have lead magnets is you can promote it within your content, a top of the article, a bottom of the article.
It's still a way to collect leads without being intrusive.
Other things that you can do is inline opt-in boxes, ribbons, top bars like hello bars, and intext call to action.
These are all ways to drive more leads to the pages you want without doing crazy popups upon first entry.
6. Irrelevant internal links
The next thing that's hurting you is irrelevant internal links.
Everyone knows that internal linking is important, but when you overdo it, it's not only going to lose value but it actually harms your SEO.
You have to do it in a very careful manner that's best for users.
If it doesn't help users, don't do it.
So, you want to make sure that you're choosing internal links that are relevant to the content and the page that people are going to read.
Don't just have tons of rich anchor text, don't just have a ton of random anchor text, do what's best for the user.
7. Duplicate content
The next thing that does not you to rank on Google is duplicate content.
This won't necessarily generate any form of penalty from Google, and they've even mentioned how they don't penalize for duplicate content, but they're not going to rank duplicate content over original content.
So, you want to make sure that you're publishing new unique content.
Now, this doesn't mean that you can cite sources or take stats from other places and cite your sources or take quotes from other people and give them credit.
It just means that your content has to be new and fresh.
And when we are talking about duplicate content, we are not just talking about word for word plagiarizing what someone else has already written, we are also talking about writing the same piece of content that's been beaten to death a thousand times.
How many pieces of content do we need to have on banana nutrition facts?
There are so many banana nutrition facts articles out there and they all talk about the same thing.
Creating another one even if it's unique and you didn't plagiarize word for word, it's not going to add any value and you're going to have a tough time ranking on Google.
8. Backlinks to spammy websites
The next thing that’s hurting your ranking is backlinks to spammy websites and domain names.
When you link out to other spammy sites, you can get caught up in what Google calls a link scheme.
A lot of times people are like “Hey I'll link to you if you link to me.”
And doing these kinds of things is called reciprocal linking and it can hurt your rankings in the long run.
You should only be linking to pages that make sense.
It is not about if you should or should not follow this link. It's about providing the best user experience.
If you link to something and you think it provides value to a user, then link to it.
If you need help with your SEO marketing to rank on Google and grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
