Why do so many websites just… never rank on Google?

I’ve been noticing this a lot—people launch websites, put in effort for months, and still get almost zero traffic from Google.

It made me wonder if the problem is not effort, but direction.

From what I’ve seen, common issues seem to be:

• targeting super competitive keywords
• weak or generic content
• no real SEO structure
• almost no backlinks

Feels like most people are “doing SEO” but not really seeing results.

Curious—what do you think is the biggest reason websites fail to rank?

I recently came across a detailed breakdown from Growth Atom that explained this quite well, but I’d love to hear real experiences here.