Why Isn’t My Website Making Money?

Your website is up and running. It looks great — you have excellent content, helpful product descriptions, and great images.

So why isn’t it making money? 

After pouring in countless hours researching your market and target audience, launching a website to crickets can be disheartening. There are a variety of reasons you aren’t seeing the revenue you hoped for — and one of the most common reasons is a lack of SEO. 

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of SEO for revenue generation and provide tips on how to improve your website’s SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy.

Why Does SEO Matter for Revenue Generation?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). This involves a range of activities, including optimizing your website’s content and structure and building high-quality backlinks. 

So why do you need SEO to generate revenue? The answer is simple: If your website isn’t ranking high in SERPs, it’s unlikely potential customers will find you. Even if you have a great website with amazing content, you won’t make much money if people can’t find you. 

Think of your website as a shop. SEO is like putting signs all around the city directing people to your store. Without it, your store may as well be invisible.

SEO can help improve website traffic and search engine rankings by optimizing your website for the keywords your target audience is searching for. By targeting the right queries and optimizing your website’s content, you can improve your website’s relevance and authority. This can lead to higher rankings in SERPs and increased traffic to your website. When you target the right keywords, you funnel people who are interested in your product or service to your website.

SEO also helps you tackle indexation and technical issues that may be sabotaging your performance or negatively affecting your site’s user experience. Including SEO in your marketing plan helps ensure your pages are indexable and makes it easier for search crawlers and visitors to navigate your site.

6 Ways To Improve SEO To Generate Revenue

Now that you understand the value of SEO for revenue generation, let’s explore some tips for improving your website’s SEO. 

1. Conduct Keyword Research & Optimize Website Content

Ok, you probably guessed it — the first step in improving your website’s SEO is to conduct keyword research. This involves identifying the relevant keywords your target audience is searching for and creating high-quality content that’s optimized for those keywords.

Understanding the nuances of keyword strategy is essential for an effective SEO approach. To create an effective keyword strategy, you’ll need to understand what short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, and keyword themes are.

Short-tail keywords, also known as head terms, generally comprise one or two words. They are broad and vague, and thus have a high search volume. For instance, if you run an online shoe store, short-tail keywords might include terms like “shoes” or “sneakers.” These kinds of keywords typically face intense competition, making it difficult for your website to rank highly for them.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords consist of around three or more words and tend to be more specific. Long-tail keywords could include “women’s red running shoes” or “men’s black leather loafers.” They may not generate as much search volume due to their specificity, but they usually have less competition and a higher likelihood of conversion since they attract users who know precisely what they’re looking for.

Striking a balance between short-tail and long-tail keywords is critical to creating a robust and well-rounded SEO strategy. Short-tail keywords help you reach a broad audience, while long-tail keywords allow you to target a more precise demographic, leading to a higher conversion rate.

These keywords can be combined into keyword themes, which are collections of semantically related keywords that share a search intent. Combining keywords into groups in this way makes it easier to rank for related terms.

But merely selecting the right keywords isn’t enough. You need to integrate them strategically throughout your website. Several key areas where you should incorporate your chosen keywords include:

1. Title Tags: The title tag is the clickable headline displayed on SERPs. It tells search engines and users what your page is about, so it should include your primary keyword.
2. Meta Descriptions: These are the short paragraphs displayed under your title tags on SERPs. A well-crafted meta description with relevant keywords can entice users to click on your link.
3. Alt Text for Images: This is the text description of an image on your site. Including keywords in your alt text can help search engines understand what the image is about and improve your visibility in image search results.
4. URLs: URLs that include your keywords not only inform search engines about the page’s content but also improve user experience as they tell readers what they can expect to find on the page.
5. Headers and Content: Naturally integrating keywords in your headers and throughout your content helps search engines understand your content better. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it can lead to penalties from search engines. That’s the beauty of keyword themes — you can use semantically-related terms throughout your copy and avoid overusing one specific term or phrase.

Follow our keyword research guide to find terms and phrases relevant to your industry, or work with an SEO agency to benefit from keyword research services. 

2. Tackle Technical Issues

Technical SEO is a fundamental part of your website’s success. It pertains to your website’s non-content elements and involves improving its backend structure and foundation. Neglecting technical SEO could result in search engines not discovering or indexing your beautifully crafted content.

• Ensure Your Website Is Crawlable: Search engines use bots, often referred to as spiders or crawlers, to discover content on the internet. If Googlebot can’t crawl your site, Google won’t index your pages, meaning you won’t show up in search results. To avoid this, correctly set up your robots.txt file and use a tool like Google Search Console to identify any crawl errors.
• Use SSL: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that provides a secure connection between a user’s web browser and your server. It’s denoted by the “HTTPS” and the padlock icon in the URL bar. Google has confirmed it prioritizes secure websites, so not having an SSL could impact your rankings.
• Implement Schema Markup: This structured data helps search engines better understand your website’s content, potentially improving your visibility on SERPs. This can manifest in rich snippets, which can significantly improve your click-through rate.
• Eliminate Broken Links: Broken links lead to 404 errors, disrupting the user experience and wasting the crawl budget. Regularly audit your site for broken links and either fix or remove them.
• Optimize Images: Large, unoptimized images can slow down your site, negatively affecting user experience and your SEO. Use appropriate file formats, compress your images, and don’t forget to use descriptive filenames and alt text.
• Improve Site Architecture: A well-structured website will enhance user experience and assist search engine bots in crawling your site. This includes logical navigation, a clean URL structure, and implementing a breadcrumb trail.
• Avoid Duplicate Content: Search engines can penalize you for duplicate content. Use canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page they should consider as the authoritative one in the case of duplicate or very similar content. Remove any duplicate content that doesn’t provide value to visitors.

Addressing these technical issues will enhance the user experience and your site’s relationship with search engine crawlers, helping ensure your content gets the attention it deserves from both potential customers and Google. 

3. Create Excellent Blog Content

Creating high-quality blog posts is another essential strategy for improving your SEO and driving organic traffic. By regularly publishing fresh content filled with your chosen keywords, you can signal to search engines your site is active, relevant, and valuable to users. Here’s how to leverage your blog for better SEO:

1. Keyword Integration: Use your keywords strategically throughout your blog posts. Remember to include them in the title, headers, meta description, and naturally within the content. However, ensure the usage is natural and beneficial to the reader.
2. Provide Value: Google prioritizes content that’s useful and informative. Writing blog posts that answer common questions, provide new information, or offer solutions to problems in your industry can increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.
3. Internal Linking: Incorporating internal links within your blog posts can help keep visitors on your site longer, improve the user experience, and help search engines understand the structure and content of your site better.
4. Shareable Content: Crafting content readers will want to share on their social media platforms and other sites will want to link to can greatly increase your visibility and bring more organic traffic to your site. This content can take the form of infographics, listicles, or interesting case studies.
5. Regular Updates: Regularly publishing new blog posts sends a signal to search engines your site is active and current. This can help improve your site’s ranking on SERPs.

By employing these strategies, your blog can become a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal, driving organic traffic and enhancing your brand’s online presence. It’s also worth considering working with an SEO content writing service to fully optimize your blog. 

4. Build High-Quality Backlinks To Improve Website Authority

Backlinks, or inbound links, are one of the most influential factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. They signal trust, authority, and credibility to search engines, showing that other websites vouch for your content. A robust backlink profile can boost your search engine visibility and drive more organic traffic to your site.

Here’s how to build a high-quality backlink profile:

• Prioritize Link Quality Over Quantity: A backlink from a reputable website with high domain authority is worth much more than multiple backlinks from low-quality websites. When evaluating the quality of a potential link, consider the website’s relevancy to your niche, its domain authority, and the quality of its content.
• Ensure Link Relevance: Search engines consider the relevancy of the sites linking to you. If the content of the linking site is related to your site’s content, the link is considered more valuable. This means a link from a fashion blog will have more weight for a clothing retailer than a link from a fishing site.
• Pursue Guest Blogging Opportunities: Guest blogging can be an excellent way to earn high-quality backlinks. Reach out to relevant blogs in your industry and pitch a valuable piece of content their audience would appreciate. When writing your guest post, you can include a link back to your site in your author bio or within the content where it provides value to the reader.
• Create Link-Worthy Content: This involves producing high-quality, unique content others will naturally want to link to. This could be original research, infographics, videos, or comprehensive guides.
• Monitor Your Backlink Profile: Regularly auditing your backlink profile can help you identify any low-quality or spammy links that could damage your site’s SEO. Tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can provide comprehensive insights into your backlink profile.

Building high-quality backlinks takes time and effort, but the payoff in terms of improved search visibility and increased organic traffic can be significant. And if this sounds too challenging or time-consuming, consider working with an SEO agency that offers link building services. They’ll have the experience and resources to build a strong backlink profile that drives your SEO efforts forward.

5. Optimize Website Speed and Mobile Responsiveness

A key component of user experience is website speed and mobile responsiveness. In other words, how quickly your site loads and how well it adapts to various device screens can significantly impact your rankings.

Google’s Core Web Vitals, a set of specific factors deemed important for a webpage’s overall user experience, includes metrics for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a page. You can check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console. 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures the load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded. A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay (FID): This quantifies interactivity and measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e., when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric calculates visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.

These factors are becoming increasingly essential in Google’s ranking algorithm, making it paramount for businesses to monitor and improve these metrics. 

Addressing the following factors will also support a positive user experience:

• Optimize Your Site’s Speed: Use website speed test tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas that need improvement. Common culprits behind slow load times include large image files, excessive JavaScript or CSS, poor server response times, and render-blocking resources.
• Ensure Mobile Responsiveness: With mobile searches consistently on the rise, having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional; it’s essential. Google’s mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Employ responsive design principles so your website automatically adjusts to different screen sizes.
• Implement AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source framework Google developed in collaboration with Twitter. AMP creates lightweight versions of web pages to help them load faster on a mobile device. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, the speed improvements it brings can boost your site’s mobile performance.
• Minimize Time to First Byte (TTFB): TTFB measures the time a user’s browser takes to receive the first byte of page content from the server. A high TTFB can delay page rendering and increase load times. Optimize your server performance to improve your TTFB.

Optimizing for speed and mobile responsiveness is an ongoing process, but the rewards — higher rankings, a better user experience, and potentially higher conversion rates — are well worth the effort.

6. Tap Into Local SEO

If your business serves customers on a local level, whether you have a physical location or you target a specific geographic area, then implementing a local SEO strategy is essential for your digital success. Local SEO is about ensuring your business is visible in search results when people close to your location are looking for your products or services.

Here’s how you can bolster your local SEO:

• Optimize Your Google My Business Listing: One of the first steps in local SEO is claiming and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This free tool from Google lets you manage how your business appears in Google Search and Maps. Be sure to fill out all the information, including your business name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, and business categories. It’s also a good idea to regularly update your listing with new photos and posts.
• Encourage and Respond to Online Reviews: Reviews play a vital role in local SEO. They not only influence customer decisions but also impact your search rankings. Encourage happy customers to leave a review on your GMB listing or other review platforms relevant to your industry. Also, make a habit of responding to both positive and negative reviews to show you value customer feedback.
• Maintain Consistent NAP Across All Platforms: Consistency is critical in local SEO. This means your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) should be the same across all online platforms — your website, social media profiles, directory listings, etc. Inconsistent information can confuse potential customers and negatively impact your search rankings.
• Localize Your Website Content: Localizing your website content can help you rank for local search queries. This could be as simple as mentioning your city or region naturally in your website copy or having a dedicated page for each location if you have more than one.
• Build Local Backlinks: Backlinks are a critical part of SEO. In the case of local SEO, you’ll want to focus on getting links from other local businesses, local directories, or community websites. 
• Implement Schema Markup for Local SEO: Schema markup is a form of structured data you can add to your website to provide search engines with more information about your business, like the products you sell, reviews you’ve collected, services you offer, etc. For local businesses, you can use Local Business Schema to provide more specific information about your location, opening hours, and more.

The goal of local SEO isn’t just to make your business visible in search results but to make it visible to the right people at the right time. By implementing these strategies, you’ll boost your online presence in your local area and beyond, ultimately driving more customers to your business.

Start Making Money with SEO

It’s time to turn the tide and start making money with your website. Assess your current SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement. Remember, every minute you delay, you’re potentially losing revenue to competitors who have already embraced the power of SEO.

Do you need a helping hand with your SEO? We offer a free consultation to help you identify the gaps in your SEO strategy and guide you on the path to increased revenue. Get in touch today!