- According to Atrust,
91% of content gets zero traffic from Google.
That means less than 1 out of every 10 web pages
get any traffic at all.
If your site is among the 9% that gets their traffic,
that's awesome and good for you.
But, if you're part of the 91% that doesn't,
it's probably because of one of
these six reasons I'm about to talk about in this video.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down the six reasons
why your site will never rank,
and I want you to stop doing this.
(cheerful music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Reason number one,
your web page doesn't have any backlinks.
This has been revealed through several studies,
but one study by Ahrefs shows the linear correlation
between backlinks and search traffic.
Authority Hacker ran a similar study and they found
that backlinks are still
the most strongly correlated factor for SEO success.
What this correlation means is
the more backlinks you get, the better your chances
of getting organic search traffic are.
Though, you don't necessarily need to be proactive
about doing outreach to get backlinks.
If you're writing amazing content or building amazing tools,
or creating an amazing product or service,
or even getting press, you'll naturally generate backlinks.
And what you'll find is,
as your site in general generates more backlinks,
all your pages, including your blog content,
will start getting more search traffic and ranking higher.
The second reason you're not getting any love from Google
is you're not leveraging search snippets.
According to Authority Hacker,
search snippets can be present in as much as 75%
of the top spots in the search for high-volume keywords.
That's huge.
Among those, featured snippets account
for 20% of all results.
If you're not leveraging things like FAQ schema markup,
you're missing out on a ton of traffic.
It's one of the reasons that I rank really high
for terms like digital marketing or online marketing,
is because I leveraged this schema markup.
I've made a video tutorial showing you
how you can use FAQ schema markup on WordPress websites,
so if you're on WordPress
you should definitely check it out,
and the link is in the description.
The third reason, the page isn't targeting a topic
with enough search traffic potential.
Ahrefs found that even when you have
over 200 referring domains to any given web page,
if you're not targeting keywords
with enough search traffic potential
you're still not going to get any traffic.
You may get some, but it's going to be very little.
In other words, if no users are searching for a topic
that you're talking about on that page,
how are you going to get any search traffic?
So, what I want you to do is do keyword research.
Use tools like Ubersuggest.
Put in a keyword, it'll tell you if that keyword's
easy to rank for, getting a lot of search traffic,
and all the other related terms out there
that also get a ton of volume
that you should be targeting.
The fourth reason?
You're not leveraging meta tags, H1 tags, and title tags
to insert your target keywords.
A study that I mentioned from Authority Hacker
shows a strong correlation
between keywords in the H1 and title tags and ranking.
Just think about it, this makes sense, right?
When you're doing a search for a term
and that term is in the listing,
you're much more likely to click
versus when you do a search for a term
and that keyword or term isn't in any of the listings.
Now, that title tag that you're putting on your website,
that's what Google's pulling from.
So, when you're doing a search on Google
and you see that title, that's your title tag in essence
that they're pulling from.
That means if you put keywords in your title tag,
meta description, heck even if you add them to your H1 tag
and throughout your web page,
you're more likely to rank.
So, if you're not leveraging these opportunities
to include your keywords,
it's going to be harder for you to rank.
The fifth reason?
You don't have HTTPS enabled.
It used to be where HTTPS was optional,
but it's not any more.
If you want to rank now, you need to use HTTPS.
It's pretty much a standard these days
when it comes to SEO.
The sixth reason?
You're getting a bad score on Google's Lighthouse audit.
While this may not guarantee you good rankings,
over 90% of the web pages on page one of Google
have high average scores on Google's Lighthouse audit.
You don't need to go crazy and optimize
for every millisecond that you can,
but overall the same study by Authority Hacker
that I mentioned earlier has identified this common trait
among the top-ranking web pages.
And, if you want an easy way of trying
to figure out your score, you can go to Ubersuggest,
put in your URL, and then click on the site audit report.
The site audit report also breaks down your page speed,
and it pulls it from Google Lighthouse.
So that way, in one place
you can get your page speed information
and figure out where you need to improve.
Your priority should be user experience,
but if you can't deliver amazing load times on your site,
it's not going to help because look,
people may just go to your page and then bounce away.
That sends Google user metrics signals saying,
"Hey, there's something wrong with this page,
"I don't like it."
Google doesn't care if
that's related to your on-page SEO, your content,
load time, they're looking at everything.
In other words, if the user isn't happy with your site,
you're not going to do well.
So that's it, if you need help with your SEO,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
If you enjoyed this video, like it, share it,
and tell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.