The entire purpose behind content creation is to reach audiences and convince them to interact with it as intended. It stands to reason that nobody wants to spend copious amounts of time creating content only for nobody to see it. Through a variety of methods – including using social media, search engines, email and traditional marketing efforts – brands can target the right audiences quickly and effectively.

However and with search engines specifically, sometimes content doesn’t perform as expected. This can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. Sometimes, there is a good reason for this, while other situations are less clear. To shed light on why your content may not be ranking well in search, let’s look at the most common culprits.

The Competition Has You Beat

Unfortunately for some brands, it is easier to break into some niches than others. A general rule for new brands pursuing SEO prominence is to focus on smaller audiences rather than larger and more generalized ones, due to the sheer amount of competition that exists in those niches. One of the biggest reasons why high-quality content fails to rank is because there is simply too much competition in that niche.

By pinging search engines with content aimed at popular or heavily-contested niches, you are fighting a battle of David versus Goliath. It may be necessary to refine your target niches and aim for SERPs that are less contested if your content is of the highest quality yet failing to rank well after a substantial amount of time.

Your Website Is Flawed

Search engines don’t just assess the value of content when deciding which sites and pages to rank: they also look at the websites themselves. From both a content and technical standpoint, websites must optimize their offerings to ensure that they are not left at a disadvantage. If your content is failing to rank despite it being valuable and despite competition not being insurmountable, then it may be time to assess the condition of your website.

Websites that are relatively new, lack a certain amount of backlinks or that have poor formatting or navigation structure rarely rank prominently in SERPs. Because these factors are just as important as the quality of your content, verifying that you do not have any technical errors causing your pages to perform poorly is paramount. There are many tools that can help you pinpoint whether there are any technical problems.

You Are Targeting the Wrong Audiences

Everybody makes mistakes. Especially for those who are new to the world of SEO, it may seem like a particular audience or SERP is the natural target for your content when in fact it isn’t. All too often, brands attempt to target specific audiences with their SEO efforts, only to discover later on that the content in question isn’t actually valued by the audience as much as they thought.

Given that search engine algorithms are incredibly adept at identifying content that audiences will actually want to read, poor rankings may be indicative of your content not being desirable to that specific SERP’s audience. In this situation, shifting strategies to target different SERPs may prove to be beneficial and can help avoid wasting time pinging search engines with content that won’t otherwise be seen.

It’s more difficult than many realize to rank prominently in search results. If you are having trouble, then consider these three common issues and verify that they are not the cause of the issue. From there, you can either fix the problem or assess whether other, more nuanced criteria could be causing an issue.