SEO is as much an art as it is a science, and it takes a seasoned internet marketing expert to build an SEO strategy that will help grow your business rather than pull it down.

Believe it or not, there’s no “playing it by the book,” or a “one fits all” approach to SEO. Even when organic SEO improves conversion, you need to have the right marketing strategy to make it happen. It would be best if you considered a targeted plan that considers all aspects of your industry and the nuances of the region you want to reach.

If you’ve been paying your SEO agency a hefty retainer—or having an inexperienced in-house employee handle it all—but not seeing the results you expected, here is a quick primer on what could be wrong with your digital marketing strategy

Your business site is not mobile-friendly

Having a mobile version of your desktop site is crucial in a digital world where more and more consumers are using their smartphones to shop. If your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not rank high in mobile search results, and you could be losing potential business to your competitors without even realizing it.

So get in touch with a good web development agency and get them to create a mobile-friendly version of your site, which essentially means that your website should fit the screen of a smartphone or a tablet perfectly, without the viewer having to adjust the screen to view the page in full.

Your website’s content is not of the highest quality

This problem is more common than you’d think, and it brings down SEO rankings big time. Often, businesses spend thousands of dollars on building a website but cut corners when it comes to paying for quality content, which invariably leaves them with poor content that neither accurately represents the business nor does anything to improve the website’s ranking.

Google and other search engines rely on a number of different parameters to determine if your site is worthy of high rankings in search results. To improve your ranking, ensure that your website has impactful, error-free content on each page and also that it’s optimized—but not stuffed—with the right keywords.

Your metadata is not optimized

Does each page on your business site have sufficient and appropriate meta tags? Have they been updated in a while to improve your search engine rankings as per trending searches? Do your meta descriptions accurately reflect what your website is all about?

Meta tags are essentially words and phrases on each page of your website that tell search engines what your business is about. Meta descriptions (information describing what’s on a page) are often visible right below the title tag of your site in a search result. If your site’s meta tags are not optimized or accurate, your search engine ranking will be adversely affected.

Your social media strategy has no meat

Social media can do so much for your business, provided you have the people and resources to use it to your advantage. Your social media activity has a considerable impact on how your site ranks in search results.

Remember that posting a couple of updates twice a week does not amount to a successful social media campaign. What you need is a well-designed and brilliantly executed social media marketing plan that will not only add to your credibility as a business but also improve your SEO outcomes.

To know more about how SEO can be used to grow your business, check out this in-depth article at https://nosstrious.com/blog/services-menu/how-your-seo-strategy-can-help-generate-revenue.

You are not utilizing backlinks as an SEO tool

Backlinking is a great way to bring traffic to your website from other credible websites that have a large readership. By publishing guest posts on authoritative websites in your niche, you can lead readers back to your site through links embedded in the guest post.

If you work with an SEO agency, ask them to show your backlink profile or use an online tool to check where all your traffic is coming from. This will give you a clear idea if your backlink strategy is focussed on quantity or quality. Indeed, the latter is the way to go if you want to establish your website as a credible and reliable business online.

Your web pages don’t load quickly

Aside from a poorly made website, the loading speed of your web pages could be making potential customers abandon your website even before they have checked it out. Even if your site has been designed extremely well, consider if it has developed and other technical flaws that could be affecting user experience and consequently your search engine ranking.

Search engines expect that a quality website will load in as little as two-to-four seconds, so correcting your page loading speed should be a priority when you’re working to improve your search rankings.