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“Why Is My Blog Post Not Ranking?” Checklist

Source: Obnoxious Antiques

Did you publish the most amazing blog post ever, and it’s still not ranking?

You can fix it!

Follow our checklist below to determine the reason your content isn’t ranking, and what you can do about it.

Table of Contents

#1. Does your blog post match the search intent behind the keyword?

First things first — let’s make sure that the blog post you wrote is what people are looking for when they’re Googling the keyword.

Think about the intent behind the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Are users trying to:

Then, check if your article matches this search intent.

If the user is looking for a guide on the topic, and you have a landing page pitching your product, you’re not going to rank.

Correct Example: You create a long-form step-by-step guide on “how to create a resume” keyword. The guide covers all the necessary steps of creating a resume (how to format it, what to include in the resume, etc.). In the end, you can pitch your resume templates (or whatever your product might be).

Incorrect Example: You make your guide all about your product, talking about how you can use it to make a resume without educating the reader at all.

#2. Is your content better than what’s currently ranking?

Read the top 3 ranking articles, and compare them to your blog post. Is your blog post:

While you CAN get amazing rankings without any backlinks, they still play a big part in SEO.

In very competitive niches, everyone has top-tier content — content quality is just the baseline.

In such cases, the content that has more high-quality rankings is more likely to rank.

For example, if you Google “Best VPN,” you’ll see that all ranking content is very high-quality: long-form, well-written, super engaging, and more.

So, what differentiates the highest ranking articles from the rest? Backlinks.

The bottom line here is, if your competition has content that matches yours, but has 100 more backlinks than you do, they WILL outrank you.

#4. Do you have supporting content pieces?

Google rewards websites that are an authority in their niche.

A website that has, say, 100 articles on accounting is going to rank a lot better than a website that has 10 articles on accounting, 10 on sales, 10 on project management, and so on.

So, instead of splitting your focus and covering a dozen topics, focus on ONE topic cluster, finish articles for every keyword in that cluster, and THEN move on to other categories.

#5. Is your blog post interlinked properly?

Interlinking is important. Here’s why:

To check how many internal links a page has, go to Search Console -> Links -> Internal links.

If your blog post doesn’t have a lot of internal links, just open up your other content pieces, and link to them.

Pro Tip — Here’s an easy way to do this. Use the following search query:

site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"

Where “keyword” is the keyword you’re trying to rank for with your article.

Google will find all the mentions of this keyword on your website. Then, all you have to do is go through these pages and link to your article.

#6. Does your website follow technical SEO best practices?

There are a bunch of technical best practices when it comes to SEO. Here’s a to-do list you can forward directly to your tech team:

💡 Pro Tip — Want to make your site speed optimization easier? Use WP Lighthouse — it’s going to do 90% of the work for you! If you’re using WordPress, that is.

#7. Does your website follow on-page SEO best practices?

This one’s pretty basic, and just about anyone does it. We’re still going to go through them, though, as a just-in-case.

Make sure that both the article you’re trying to rank, as well as all your other web pages, follow the typical SEO best practices:

Check out our other article on how we scaled our clients’ SEO from 0 to 300k monthly traffic and beyond 😜

To make on-page SEO easier, we recommend using RankMath or Yoast.

#8. Did you wait long enough?

And one last thing — did you wait long enough after publishing the blog post?

Here’s a sad (but true) fact: SEO takes time.

There’s a very good chance that it’s going to take you ~6 months to a year after publishing a new blog post to see results. So, if your blog post/website doesn’t have any of the issues we outlined in this checklist, then all you have to do is wait and keep publishing content — your rankings WILL come, it just takes time.