How to Improve Underperforming Content
Content is the backbone of any brand trying to establish its online presence in today’s landscape. Content plays a significant role in optimizing and improving your SEO. If we pay close attention to the communication between Google and Webmasters in the last few years, then it’s clear that they have prioritized content for ranking websites or blogs. But despite working so hard on creating unique and relevant content, some content creators fail to achieve a good ranking on Google. Here comes the theory of underperforming content, which is often ignored by various content creators.
What is Underperforming Content?
Underperforming content is a piece of content that does not perform up to its full potential. Despite putting in maximum efforts, some content does not perform up to the mark. There could be multiple reasons behind the non-performance of your content, but the primary reason is that your content is simply not good enough to attract organic traffic.
In this article, we will mention how you can detect and improve the underperforming content:
Google Search Console
You can use the URL inspection tool to understand the status of your page or content. With this tool, you can analyze if you are allowing Google to crawl or index your page. With its Coverage feature, you can access the indexability and crawlability of your page.
Check if there is any difference between declared canonical versus Google-selected canonical. If the two differ, that means Google does not recognize your declared canonicals.
Chrome Extensions
Chrome Extensions simplify our lives to a great extent. Some Chrome Extensions can help you get a lot of information on your content like your page’s indexability status, meta robots tags, and canonical tags. You can check out Chrome Extensions like “SEO minion” or “SEO Meta in 1 click” to access information about your page.
JavaScript Check
JavaScript plays a significant role in improving the interactivity of your page. It may change some key HTML elements that are very crucial for SEO. Various tools like Mobile-friendly tests, Rich snippet results, and URL inspection tools can help you in finding out whether JavaScript might be a problem for your SEO or not.
Intent and SERP Analysis
With SERP and Intent analysis, you can cross-check various reasons why your content is not performing well. You can check whether your content is not compelling enough compared to ranking on page one. Other reasons for your content’s underperformance might include the wrong format of your content, seasonal content, or content being overshadowed by SERP features.
Duplication Issues
Duplicate content hurts your Google ranking. You can use various SEO tools to check whether two or more ranking URLs are flip-flopped. Here, Google cannot understand which URL to rank for a specific keyword. Check if the two URLs are appearing in a search result for an exact keyword. That is also a clear sign of duplicity. You can also check your SEO visibility by landing page. There might be a problem if two different URLs are ranked for similar keywords.
Now, as we have discussed the possible reasons for the underperformance of your content and how you can detect it, let’s dive into the solutions to fix this issue:
- Check if your page can be crawled and indexed correctly.
- Make sure your page does not fall under blocked resources in Robots.txt.
- Make sure your page does not contain a no-index meta robots tag or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere.
- Check if other pages have a canonical tag pointing to your URL.
- Make sure your website does not have any non-SEO friendly JavaScript.
- Make sure your page is internally linked to the site.
- Make sure your page is present in your XML sitemap.
- Always research what the SERP looks like for your topic.
- Make sure you don’t overdo the mapping of keywords.
- Always pick the top three keywords and focus on making your content relevant to those keywords.
- Write unique and keyword-rich titles to improve your on-page ranking.
- Do some SEO keyword research to write interesting meta-data.
- Don’t change your metadata frequently.
- Work on the readability factor of your content.
- Use enough space between lines and paragraphs.
- Check if your content’s tone and language match your target audience.
Conclusion
Underperforming content is a prominent yet understated issue by many content creators. But by using the right tools and processes in place, you can easily fix your underperforming content.
To fix this issue, make sure you dive into the reasons first and then take necessary measures. You can follow the process mentioned above to detect the likely reasons for the underperformance of your content. Ensure you request your page’s indexing with the URL inspection tool once you have made the necessary changes.
