SEO is substantial for the success of online businesses. If you are making major seo mistakes, you’ll end up losing potential customers.
SEO is kept on evolving and there are major opportunities under SEO that can help your business grow in web traffic, search ranking, and sales. However, with plenty of SEO techniques, there is a good chance you could be implementing the wrong optimizations. In this article, we’ll be talking about
11 Major SEO mistakes that might be doing and how you can avoid them.
Mistake 1: Not doing keyword research
Keyword research allows you to identify targeting keywords for your business. Without finding the right keywords, your entire SEO strategy can go in vain. Creating content randomly on the keywords that nobody’s searching for cannot help you bring more traffic to the website. As a result, zero search traffic.
In order to get search traffic, your content needs to be targeted at the topics that people are searching for. But do you find these topics? Keyword research is the answer.
Keyword research is the process of identifying words your target customers are using and searching for your products, services, and content. It is the only way to figure out what keywords people are typing into search engines in order to create content around it.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Before you publish any page, make sure the page targets a keyword with search traffic potential. To find the target keywords, you use keyword research tools such as Ahrefs’ keywords explorer, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, or a few free online tools. The tools will provide you insights on keywords like keyword difficulty, volume, competition, and traffic.
Mistake 2: Taking slow page speed for granted
Page speed has become a google ranking factor. Google gives more importance to fast-loading site and penalizes slow ones. From the user experience point of view, visitors tend to trust less and are likely to leave, resulting in a high bounce rate.
No matter how compelling a design is or what features you’ve added, a long page load time means no leads. So, if you are wondering what loading speed is optimal, then ideally, less than 3 seconds is considered as good.
So, if your website or webpage is struggling with a slow page speed, make sure to optimize it with page speed optimization techniques.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Implementing page speed optimization will allow you to speed up the website. If you are handling a wordpress site, you can use a speed optimization plugin. A plugin that helps in optimizing images, reducing the size of web pages, cutting out CSS and JavaScript, and improving server response time.
Mistake 3: Not building enough relevant backlinks
Links are an important Google ranking factor. Backlinking is a method to build domain authority. The higher will be the domain authority, the more you’ll have chances to rank on keywords.
However, quantity beats quality here. Stop getting tons of backlinks from sites that have no relevance to your business or domain. Rather it is better to bring in links from relevant, well-ranking websites with solid reputations.
These days, backlinks are earned—not purchased, so stop buying links. Google can easily spot spammy behavior and penalize offenders.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Reach out to the content creators who may be interested in your content and convince them to link to you. Make sure you check the domain rating score, traffic, and ranking of the website you want to link back to you.
Mistake 4: Not opting for Local SEO
Local SEO helps in the optimization of local search to increase online visibility. It turns out, that you can bring more foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location.
So, by not opting for local SEO, you can slip away major business growth opportunities.
Avoiding This Mistake:
With local SEO, you can optimize for local search keywords that your potential customers might be using when searching for a service or product in the city. Therefore, you need to use city or region-specific keywords and target the audience in particular age groups.
You can also create a business profile on listing platforms such as Google My Business etc. Make sure to keep the information up to date you have provided on your business listing profile, making it easier for the customers to know about your business.
Mistake 5: Keyword Stuffing in content to rank pages
Search ranking is based on keywords users type in. But overstuffing them in the content can hurt rankings. Google penalizes a web page ranking that exceeds the ideal keyword density of the page. Keyword density is the average number (expressed as a percentage) of keywords or phrase that appears in your content.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Ideally, many SEOs recommend using 1-2 keywords for every 100 words of content. So, if you write 1000 words of content, the ideal number for a key phrase to appear will be 10. Use a natural flow of writing and aim to provide the best reader experience.
Mistake 6: Ignoring Meta Tags & Descriptions
Meta descriptions and title tags are two major important and underestimated elements of SEO. Skipping them means missing out on the potential to rank content for the keywords.
Google or other search engines consider meta tags when it crawls the page, so when done correctly, they can improve your content’s performance.
Schema markup is another element often forgotten by content marketers. It helps search engines to understand the context of your content.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Make your title and meta descriptions of the page compelling and keyword-rich to get the most out of search engines while getting more clicks from the users.
While writing meta description and title, follow the recommended length of words, keep it right, not too short or too long.
Mistake 7: Skipping Image tags
Images carry much importance in deciding the visuals of the website. Users find images much more engaging than simple text. Skipping image alt tags could stop your image’s reward by the search engines in the ranking. This is because crawlers read the images and use tags to identify it.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Add alt tags to help search engines understand what the images are about. You can do this by going through the images you want to optimize in the content management systems you are using.
Mistake 8: Missing internal link opportunities
Internal linking creates a connective chain between pages, helping users to jump from one page to another. Missing out on internal links is the major seo mistakes seen among marketers. Thus, it’s always profitable to consider placing links to the top-performing pages in your content. This is a way to give page visibility and create additional traction.
Adding internal links just for the sake of including them in the article should be avoided. Instead, link to the keywords which are relevant to the piece of content or topic you’ve linked to.
Also, it’s crucial to not overdo internal linking.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Linked related webpages with internal links to increase their visibility and performance. Audit your website to check the internal link structure and broken link issues. There are many pages you would be thinking to link but avoid linking from any irrelevant pages in order to keep the number of links balanced.
Mistake 9: Plagiarised content
Content originality is a game changer for search ranking. However, plagiarism is quite a common SEO mistake. Plagiarised content doesn’t accept by search engines, instead, it can be penalized.
Most e-commerce brands write the same product descriptions when selling similar products. So, make sure to create your content from scratch to keep it original and free from plagiarism.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Luckily, its duplicate content can be fixed. You can set up 301 redirects from the duplicate pages to the original pages. Another option is to employ the rel=canonical attribute or use the content=”noindex,follow” meta robots tag for the HTML head of each page you want to exclude from Google’s index. The best solution depends on your goals.
Mistake 10: Skipping Website Audit
Auditing helps find optimization opportunities on your website. When it comes to major seo mistakes, site auditing is often skipped. It reports how users and search engines perceive your web pages.
It will also make room for improvements you might not be aware of but could be affecting your performance.
Avoiding This Mistake:
You can use tools like SEMrush to scan your website for hundreds of parameters that you must work on improving. Thus, it will ensure that GoogleBots can crawl and index your site with precision.
Mistake 11: Not treating SEO as an ongoing marketing strategy
SEO is not a one-time process but an ongoing marketing strategy. Even if you’re ranking in the top position today, there is no guarantee that you’ll be number #1 tomorrow. Every business is competing for top positions. You need to keep up with the latest trends and incorporate best practices to stand out from the crowd.
Avoiding This Mistake:
Keep SEO consistent to rank high and grow your search traffic exponentially. Creating an SEO strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. You can start with creating pages, get first-page keyword rankings and optimize to maintain your performance.
Get a customized SEO strategy ready for you
If you need SEO services to rank your business and drive more traffic to your website, Lion bear media is here for you. With 10 years of experience, we have a team of SEO specialist who knows what it takes to achieve the best results. So, it’s time to beat your competition with our SEO customized strategy, get your free SEO audit today.
Read More ➣➣ 10 Powerful SEO Tips To Boost Traffic To Your Website
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