12 Barriers to SEO (and How to Overcome Them)

Are you having difficulty attracting traffic to your website? Do you have an awesome website and know without a doubt that if you only had traffic, your site would make money? Well, there are myriad obstacles that can prevent your site from being appropriately optimized for search engines.  Unfortunately, these barriers to search engine optimization (SEO) will continue to prevent online traffic from finding your website.

The goal of SEO is to get your web pages included on search engine results pages (SERPs) based on your keyword set.  As search engine users find your pages, they will click on your link and be redirected to your site.  Once there, you have the opportunity to convert them into customers.

It is estimated that in 2011 the average conversion rate was just below 3%.  This means that you need at least 1,000 visitors to get 30 of them to make a purchase.  Clearly, you need to identify your SEO barriers and address them in order to, at minimum, achieve this average conversion rate.  The following list includes both external and internal website barriers that can impact your site’s success.

1.     Poorly Defined Plan

Start at the beginning.  If you already have your website up and running, this means stopping, and taking a step back.  Do you have a clear plan of action pertaining to your site?  What is the purpose of your site?  What about goals?  What do you hope to achieve?  What do you want visitors to do once they get to your site?  Without specific calls to action, trying to optimize your site can be counter-productive.  Clearly outline what you want your site to accomplish from a business perspective.  Then, pretend you are a prospective customer and go through your site.  Does it engage you?  Do you know what you are expected to do?  Is the site easy to navigate?  Where do you lose interest?  Once you have completed this task, ask someone you trust to go through the same process and provide feedback.  With that feedback in hand, continue through the remainder of this list to see what other areas can be improved.

2.     Design Came First

Did you design your site before you developed the content?  Are you making your content fit your site design?  If so, you may be limited in your SEO options from the get-go.  The layout of your site might not be customer-friendly so when you do get traffic, they quickly leave before even seeing your call to action. When indexing your site, search engines also consider the layout.  Sites that are not easy to navigate or do not follow a logical progression may not be indexed by search engines.  Even if you have already spent thousands of dollars on your site design, you may need to go back to the drawing board if your current design is a barrier.

3.     Use of Splash Pages

These types of pages are not only annoying to customers, but they can be viewed as navigational obstacles by search engines.  A splash page is basically a preliminary entry page that displays an image or animation that you must either “skip” or “enter” in order to get to the main website.  These pages generally cannot be indexed by search engines.  Worse, by redirecting customers to the main page, your site immediately throws up a barrier to search engines which do not like redirected pages, especially on the first page.

4.     Incorporated Frames

Another design problem involves using frames on your website.  There are two main problems with frames.  Customers tend to avoid sites with frames, especially if there are multiple frames that must be scrolled.  And, search engines don’t really know what to do with them.  You are likely to only get your first frame indexed by search engines.  So, any additional pages that use frames beyond your homepage will not be included on SERPs since they will not be indexed.

5.     Images Instead of Text for Links

The key here is to remember that search engines can only “read” texts.  They have no way of understanding what an image is unless you describe it.  Using images to represent a link might look nice on a web page but does absolutely nothing for SEO.  Search engines need the actual text that a text link provides in order to know how to index the link.  Without that text, the link is simply ignored.  This can be particularly crucially when you consider that there are multiple browsers that your visitors use and your site must work properly in each browser.  Take the time to figure out how to make that happen without relying on image shortcuts.  If you still want to use images for your text links, the solution is to also include text links without the images as well – in this respect, you are designing for your customers and search engines separately.

6.     Content Not Optimized

By far one of the biggest barriers to SEO is problematic content.  Duplicate content is a big no-no. This includes content on your own site as well as content on other sites.  Having too little content compared to images and flash will also cause your site to be ignored by search engines.  Also, if you only have older content your site will be lower on SERPs.  To truly optimize your content, you need to have fresh content regularly added to your site.  Each web page should include keywords.  Title tags should be relevant to your respective web pages and their content.  Most importantly, your content should be relevant to your customers and be of the highest quality.  This is of the utmost importance to search engines.

7.     Insufficient Keyword Research

Don’t randomly select your keywords.  Take the time to conduct in-depth keyword research so you are confident you are using the best keywords for your site.  Automatically going with the most general and most popular keywords is not necessarily a recipe for SEO success.  In fact, it can sink you pretty quickly.  You have to keep in mind that you already have so much online competition before you even get started that using those types of keywords will not work to get you ranked high on SERPs. It may only take adding a word or two to your current keywords to make your site competitive.  Find out what people are really looking for when they use your keywords.  You should be prepared to do this on an on-going basis since your keywords are likely to change as your customer needs change.  It is well worth the effort to update your keywords for SEO.

8.     Not Enough Links

The more inbound links you have, the more credible your site appears to search engines.  The caveat here is that the links must be of the highest quality possible.  Links to sites that are not related to your content can be harmful to your SEO.  So while the number of links is important, it is really the number of quality links that make all the difference.  The more of these links you have, the quicker search engines will view your site as a high-trust domain that deserves to be included high on SERPs.  Stay away from link farms and other services that “guarantee” you a high number of inbound links in a short period of time.  Instead, focus on obtaining organic links or use a reputable link building service that can get you the type of links that are SEO-friendly.  Organic links are relevant links – they connect your site and sites with related or complementary content.  In other words, your links should be to sites your customers would be interested in visiting.

9.     Too Much Emphasis on Paid Advertising

Don’t rely on your paid search advertising to make up for your lack of SEO.  Not only is this a costly proposition, you simply will not get the large amount of organic traffic to your site that SERPs provide.  Paid search campaigns should complement your organic SEO efforts, not replace them.  These campaigns are a great way to target specific customers.  But it is traditional SEO techniques that will prove to be the most productive for your site.

10.     Inadequate Support for Conversions

We are full-circle back to making sure your site is customer-friendly.  Well, actually, more than that.  Is your site made for conversions?  Is it searchable?  Can customers easily locate a site map to find what they are looking for?  Is your shopping cart easy to use?  Is your site safe for online purchases? How quickly do you respond to customer assistance requests?  Do you have a toll-free number customers can call?  Is there an on-line representative available to chat?  Your site needs to be 100% designed for your customers.  They should not see error or blank pages.  They should have multiple means of contacting you for assistance.  They should not want to “abandon” your site because it is just too difficult to navigate.  Rather, your conversion process should flow smoothly.  And, you should test this regularly to make sure it stays that way.

11.     Over-Submission to Search Engines

Typical newbie mistake – submit your site to every search engine that exists. What you really should do is stick to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing which are responsible for over 75% of all online search activity.  You can add a few more that may be relevant to your particular niche.  And then call it a day.  Anything more is really not necessary.

12.     Not Following Search Engine Guidelines

This is a catch-all that includes just about everything else not already mentioned.  Your site will be indexed by search engines as long as you follow their guidelines without deviation.  Breaching guidelines can result in your site being de-indexed, blacklisted, or banned.  And it takes tremendous time and knowledge to get your site reconsidered for inclusion once that occurs.

If your site is guilty of any of these identified barriers, you have little to no chance of being the great success you expect.  The good news is that, for the most part, these problems can easily be fixed.  It just takes time and little know-how to get your site a higher Page Rank and included on SERPs so your future customers can find you!

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