We’ve all made mistakes, no one can vouch they haven’t, however, some tend to be more obvious than others. And then comes that one mistake that can haunt you for years. Talking about digital mistakes, one guaranteed error that can chew your business up is screwing up your website’s SEO strategy.
Having a fair idea about how struggling businesses go about, I can utter this with confidence that if you spill the milk on your SEO strategy, it can sabotage your bottom line of the business.
Look let’s be honest—there’s perhaps nothing worse than being pointed out that your SEO or marketing firm is actually hurting your business. We get that. Here are the focal points that we have gathered that can save your business from reaching a downfall. Skim through each one, and compare it to your current strategy.
If your strategy checks out, congratulations! Needless to say if it doesn’t then your company is probably making one of these SEO errors, don’t panic. Everything is fixable.
MISTAKE #1: KEYWORD OFFENDERS
One of the most standard miscalculations about SEO is that all of it revolves around keywords. While this may have been the absolute truth five years ago, in 2019, keywords only play one part in a complex algorithm. There are multiple mistakes that keywords can make you do, including:
- Keyword stuffing – The stuffing happens when you literally flood a web page’s text by having recurring keywords. It’s unpleasant, and it gets very obvious to read, and can get you penalized within no time.
- Using incorrect keywords – you want a high ranking, for let’s say high-end kitchen remodels, you don’t have to optimize it for “cheap kitchen remodels” doesn’t matter if it has a high search volume. If high-end remodel is what you offer, then the people that search for cheap one’s won’t really buy from you. Be vigilant and clever when you choose your keywords which should contribute to your bottom line.
- Going for only one optimized keyword– Woof, that’s a rugged mistake. You don’t want to put all your SEO eggs in one basket by optimizing for only one keyword or key phrase. At the top of my head I can think of 8 different ways to tell Google I need a mechanic to fix a broken battery:
- I need a mechanic
- I have broken battery
- How to fix my broken battery?
- Mechanics near me
- Fix a broken battery
SEO MISTAKE #2: THE QUALITY IN YOUR CONTENT IS LACKING
What is the relationship between content marketing and SEO? Content is perhaps the king, but you’re not going to sit on the throne unless the content you have produced is of high-quality. What does high- the quality really mean? You need to develop such content that your crawlers find valuable. The two top mistakes we see when it comes to content are
- Scraped content– Exactly like it sounds, scraped content is content that is plagiarized, copied and pasted from a different source. We have observed that a lot of service companies scrape their content from as from cheap SEO agencies and manufacture websites. Google can spot scraped content from 8,000 miles away. So before you even THINK about claiming someone else’s words as your own, drop, stop and roll.
- Thin content –Thin content is determined with the amount of how valuable it is to the audience, if it has to offer little or no value at all to the readers then it is thin as a single hair strand. Examples include automatically generated content, duplicate pages, pages with extremely little content or doorway pages. Let me give you an analogy, take thin content like this: a blockbuster movie with surface-level characters and plot. It will get bad reviews, nobody would want to see it, and the production company will lose money.
If you feel you have a scraped or thin content, seek out pages through your analytics which have a high bounce rate. Crawlers bounce from your website when they at any point hit the back button and exit quickly from your webpage. Check if the bounce rate is higher from the webpage, that certainly means that they aren’t finding it helpful.
SEO MISTAKE #3: YOU ARE NEGLECTING HOW YOUR WEBSITE WORKS
We need to get you to speed up.
These are essentials, your website needs to be secure, fast, marked up correctly that can help in securing the top spots in Google’s algorithm and mobile friendly. There have to be no ifs and buts when it comes to this.
The horrible website mistakes that adversely affect SEO include:
- Your website isn’t fast enough – Website speed isn’t just the requirement of the users, it also plays a vital role and matters to SEO. The users expect to have every single page on your website to open under 3 seconds and so does google, they are pretty much aligned on this.
- Your website isn’t secure – Secure websites are now identifiable with a green “locked” symbol, and unsecured websites would be labeled with a red “unsecured” symbol or a gray “i.” It’s also now a search ranking factor, meaning if your site is unsecure, it will rank lower than secured sites.
- Your website isn’t mobile-friendly –Users want easy access to websites. Gone are the days when internet browsing was only limited to desktops and PCs. In the prevailing time, people are using mobile devices to access the web. Make sure that your website is comfortably viewable across a wide range of devices, including smaller smartphones and easily accessible.
- Your website has no tags – Google something right now. be it anything. Now gaze at the top search results. You’ll find each one of them having an optimized descriptions and head tags and schema tags. Check out those reviews, stars directions, current positions and “search website now”. They all appear in the search result because of the schema, not only it pimps your website in the search result but also helps google to categorize your text in a better way.
SEO MISTAKE #4: HAVING NO WEBSITE AUTHORITY
So what exactly goes into “website authority”? It is rather an amalgamation of signals. If you want to dominate in authority, try avoiding these common SEO mistakes:
- Not having any external links have shady backlinks – External links that are pointing to your page are the mini-recommendations. The basic line of thinking is that if another website (the more authoritative the better) finds value in your content— Before you say it – no, true guest blogging hasn’t vanished. Having a guest post secured on a prominent site can and will increase your blog traffic and will help you build your brand into the bargain. Also, it will make your site rank on the initial pages on Google when your target keywords get numerous clicks. However, be warned and keep yourself updated with the radically changing standards of guest blogging and spammy tactics could lead to stiff penalties
SEO MISTAKE #5: YOU FORGT ABOUT THE WEBSITE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is a shadowed valuable source of data on about every conceivable aspect of your site, from visitor demographics your most popular pages to. Keep a keen eye on the data fetched by the Analytics, and make the use of this information to perform your promotional and content strategies. Pay heed to what pages and posts are proving the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, where, and when your site traffic is coming from.
It is rather easy to get all the above right, but if you are losing the track of tracking your efforts with the right analytics, it’s all for nothing. The correct tracking and analytics can give your insight into the following:
- What is the return rate of the visitors to your site (specific pages)?
- Your visitors’ location
- What generate the most leads for your website?
- Bounce rate of the web pages
- The exit rates of the pages
- The average time spent by visitors on your site
- Branded searches vs. non-branded search
- Visitor’s goal path (which were the pages someone visited before the completion of the goal)