Reaching the top spots of the search engine results pages can improve your company’s exposure, establish you as an industry authority, and deliver the kind of ROI you want to see. So why isn’t your website ranking at the top yet? That’s the million-dollar question that every company has asked itself at one point or another. Unfortunately, there isn’t a million-dollar answer.

Your website might be struggling to reach the top for any number of reasons. So, if it feels like you’ve been at it for a long time without getting the best results, consider these possibilities:

You Haven’t Given It Enough Time

There’s no way around it. SEO is not an overnight process. It takes time to research, create, and implement a strategy and begin producing content. Then it takes more time for Google to realize changes have been made, and then you have to wait for the search engine to determine if you are really providing new value. In it, she states that, in general, it takes four months to a year to first implement improvements and then for you to start seeing results.

Your Keyword May Not Mean What You Think It Should

The point of all this is that you may want to rank a certain page for a certain keyword, and despite all the good SEO you do, it never quite seems to break for you because the word means something different to you than it does to Google.

Take a closer look at the first page and see if maybe the types of results Google wants to show are different from the kind you want to provide.

Your Website May Look Great, but It’s Beauty is Only Skin Deep

You’ve paid a lot for a well-designed and very modern website. Everything about it looks great. You check it out on a daily basis just to appreciate the design a little more. It’s possible that your design may look great but hasn’t accounted for every SEO angle.

There could be any number of things holding you back, including:

• Duplicate content
• Insufficient content
• Old, untouched, stale content
• Confusing navigation
• Split keyword focus, so there are multiple pages that could rank for a given word
• Incomplete basics, such as metas, alt tags, and schema markup
• No blog or other way to continually refresh your content

You Have Gone Unnoticed by the Web at Large

You need a good portfolio of links from various sources. Some should be no-follow, some should be from really good sites, some should be just normal sites. Buying links is out of the question. Link schemes, also bad. It’s important to find natural ways to increase the good links and avoid the ones that may raise flags for Google.

Google May Have Put You in the Penalty Box

A Manual Action penalty can completely remove your website from Google’s search results.

If you’ve previously ranked really well and then dropped significantly (if not completely out of the rankings), you may be on the wrong side of a penalty.

The only thing you can do is check the Google Manual Actions report and start correcting the issues.

What could cause a Manual Action? According to Google, you could be penalized if the reviewer determines that you have:

• A hacked site – Someone has uploaded and hidden malicious content on your site.
• User-generated spam – Spam comments on forums or blogs.
• Spammy freehosts – A significant portion of the pages hosted on a service are spammy.
• Spammy structured markup – Markup on the page is outside the guidelines, like making some content invisible to users.
• Unnatural links to your site – If you have a lot of links deemed artificial, deceptive, or manipulative (including buying links or participating in link schemes), you may be penalized.
• Unnatural links from the site – Same as above, but now they’re coming from your site.
• Thin content with little or no added value – Your pages need to offer some real value to users.
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects – I.e., showing different pages to users and to Google.
• Pure Spam – This includes most of the stuff already mentioned, just more aggressive and overt.
• Cloaked images – Manipulative use of images in order to get more clicks.
• Hidden text and keyword stuffing – These are oldies but goodies, and apparently it’s still enough of a problem for Google to list it here.

You’re Treating Your Website Like It Exists in a Vacuum

SEO does not exist in a vacuum. It lives right here with its neighbors: content marketing, social media, PPC, and many other online endeavors.

Elements like time on site, number of clickthroughs, number of mentions around the internet, and engagement on social media all figure into your rankings. Granted, some of them affect your rankings more indirectly than others, but they all play an important role. Google is looking at more signals than just those you’re putting out on your website.

We’re not saying that posting regularly on Facebook is directly connected with better rankings. We’re saying that building a community on social media will lead to more people visiting your site, clicking your links, and reading your content.

Your Competition Is Doing More Than You

Search engine optimization is no longer a secret technique that your competition has never heard of. It’s an integral part of modern marketing, and for every link you’re not building and every blog you’re not publishing, your competition is.

Remember, when you start doing SEO, it isn’t you against Google. It’s you against all your regular competition. And you’re all aiming to set up shop in a very limited space.