Whether you’re doing search engine optimization (SEO) for your website on your own, or have assigned the task to an in-house SEO team or outsourced it to an organic SEO company, there may be times when you do not get the expected results despite your efforts. This could be because you made some mistakes while implementing SEO on-page and off-page strategies.
Changing marketing strategies, search engine optimization updates and customer priorities, make it important for marketers and businesses to stay up to date with changes and be aware of common SEO mistakes that can be ignored without proper knowledge of SEO factors.
Our SEO experts discuss common SEO mistakes and tips to avoid them. See whether you’re making any of these mistakes –
- Not Focusing on Search Intent
Search intent is the audience’s intention behind an online search. For instance, if someone is searching for “how to a tie scarf around neck” and if the result shows up content for “best scarves for women”, users will get irritated because they didn’t get what they’re looking for.
Google always aims to provide users with the most relevant result for their query. User intent is too a ranking factor and so, whatever content you produce, make sure it is optimized for your targeted audience’s search intent. Include keywords that readers may use to find you and provide answers for any queries they might have. For details, read our blog on how to boost SEO with search intent.
Find out whether the user intent is navigational, informational, commercial or transactional and provide content accordingly. Make sure to create different content types and formats such as how-to guides, step-by-step tutorials, blog posts and more. Find out what questions searchers tend to ask by checking Google’s “People also ask” box and provide relevant answers.
- Not Using Analytics to Track Conversion
SEO strategies and algorithms are constantly changing with search engine developments and consumer behavior changes, and you need to be aware of these updates. Analytics reports can help you to track progress and find the best ways to optimize your site along with ranking factors. Consider using tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console to analyze your website’s performance, find out high-traffic, competitive and low-traffic keywords.
Google Analytics can help
- track website performance
- collect visitor insights
- determine top sources of user traffic
- measure the success of marketing campaigns
- track goal completions
- discover trends in user engagement
You’ll be missing all such important information if you’re not tracking your website conversion and working towards resolving the weaker elements.
Not Writing Unique, Informative Content
You cannot gain customer trust and engagement without investing time to create and publish valuable content. Not producing the right content that can get your audience’s attention will impact your sales and conversions. Your content needs to be unique and valuable and at the same time well optimized for search.
Well-written content is also important to build quality links. Include visual content such as video or text tutorials and infographics in your blog posts and articles to make it link worthy.
Know what your audience is looking for and provide content accordingly. Never try to cover different topics within a single piece of content just for the sake of including keywords. Also, avoid adding multiple keywords in one article. The writer needs to be creative and add videos and images to enhance the reader’s experience. Create SEO-friendly as well as user-friendly content that both search engines and humans can understand.
Implementing an effective content marketing strategy is important for businesses to generate leads, build credibility and trustworthiness with the target audience, and boost your website rank in search results.
- Not Focusing on the Right Keywords
This is one of the most common SEO mistakes most businesses make. Even if you’ve created informative content, it may not work if you’re focusing on wrong keywords. Instead of optimizing pages for generic keywords, focus on using the right keywords that go with the content.
Another serious mistake is not researching long tail keywords. Make sure to optimize your pages with different long tail keywords and add your company’s location to the keyword. Longer and more specific keywords can help you to rank better.
Use a keyword analytics tool, just like SEMrush, WordStream, or Google Keyword Planner to analyze your organic as well as paid keywords and analyze page traffic, search volumes, trends, related keywords, competitors’ data and more. Using keyword research tools will help you find the keywords that are most relevant to your business.
Consider introducing the keyword phrase early in your content, such as in the first paragraph, to increase your chances of ranking higher. Never stuff content with keywords – use them in a natural way.
- Not Correcting Broken Links
When users access your website and encounter a 404 error or don’t find what they expect to see, it leaves a bad impression. Broken links on a website can affect the user experience and impact your SEO efforts. When there are multiple broken links, there are chances that search bots will move to other websites, without even indexing or crawling other important pages in your website, thus affecting your page’s domain authority.
Perform regular audits to identify broken links in your site and replace any broken links or 404 pages with active links.
Focusing on avoiding these mistakes and taking steps to correct them will improve traffic to your web and boost your online presence. There are other things you need to watch out for too which we will discuss in our next blog.
