Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an intricate and delicate process that can easily become confusing. If you or your business is new to search engine optimisation, it’s easy to make some of these common SEO mistakes and not even realise it. These seven tips will help you succeed in the game of SEO and help you avoid potential pitfalls down the road.
Having a plan/roadmap.
The first major mistake companies make in SEO is not having a plan. When you create a company you set goals for your brand’s improvement. The same needs to happen for your website, what are you looking to do through your website, and how can you achieve this?
So when setting up your website, set yourself some goals whether it’s making conversions, maintaining a high clickthrough rate and a low bounce rate or even have a percentage of users sign up for a service. Next, you need to make sure that you continue to analyse the data surrounding these goals, this will help you understand what is and isn’t working when attempting to achieve the goals you have set.
Page speed optimization.
As of August last year, one of Google’s ranking factors now considers overall page experience. Page Speed Insights is a fantastic tool that runs a quick test on your page and provides you with different opportunities for site improvements that you can make in order to further optimise your user’s experience.
For example, the most basic change you can make to your page speed could be resizing images. Large image files can take a while to load onto your page, so resizing these images could greatly improve your page’s speed. This, and other technical SEO fixes, are a great way to improve your user experience and rankings.
Keyword Planning.
Keyword planning is an important part of SEO. It’s the process of identifying the keywords that are most relevant to your brand and webpage and then using them to optimise your website for search engines.
Using Semrush or Google Keyword planner we are able to look at what words or phrases are being searched the most. However, knowing your product/services and your target audience also plays a massive role in keyword planning. You need to think about what users are searching for in order to find your brand/services. When using keyword planning systems you’ll be looking for words/phrases that are relevant to your site, but also that have a high search volume and low competition
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Another common mistake that happens within SEO is keyword stuffing. Although you want to rank high for your keyword, trying to continually stuff the same word into your pages or even your content can mean you rank lower. Google will crawl your site and will rank you lower for any form of spamming.
Creating consistent and relevant content.
Another common SEO mistake that companies make, is not producing enough relevant and consistent content. Content is a fantastic way to gain more traffic to your site, by engaging more with your audience, it is essentially an opportunity for you to communicate with your audience and humanise your brand.
Content is also a brilliant way to help with ranking on Google. When Google crawls your page, it is looking for information within your content that shows you are able to answer a user’s search query. If you are showing your audience and Google that you are an expert in your chosen field, then you are building trust with your customers and authority with Google at the same time.
Optimising your site on both desktop and mobile.
As we spoke about earlier, the user’s page experience is massively important. In 2018 Google started mobile-first indexing, which means Google will rank your site based on how well your mobile version works, and this makes perfect sense as most people use their mobiles more to search the web.
One of the best ways to avoid this issue is by creating a responsive webpage. This allows your website to make changes to itself depending on the screen size or device you are accessing it from.
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Internal links and backlinking.
We spoke earlier about the importance of content, well another common SEO mistake companies make is not building links within their content. When we are creating content it has a purpose for our site, for instance, if I were selling fruit I could write a blog on the importance of fruit to your diet. This blog would then feature a link to my page where you can buy fruit. This generates webpage traffic but also the trust of my site.
Just adding links to your content isn’t where it ends either. A third party could be writing content and linking you within it. And this is perfectly ok as long as the content has a high authority rank and a low toxicity rank. So this means it is important to check our backlinks, this can easily be done in Semrush’s backlink audit tab which helps you to figure out which links are helpful to your site and which ones hinder your site’s ranking ability.
Utilising meta tags and descriptions.
Meta titles and descriptions are the first things search engines look for when you’re searching for something online. They’re also the first thing your potential customers will read, so it’s important to make them count.
A meta title is the line of text that appears below your site’s URL in a browser window. The meta description is the line of text that appears under your site’s URL in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Meta titles are short (a maximum of 64 characters), and they appear in bold on Google and other search engine results pages. Meta descriptions are longer (up to 160 characters) and also appear in bold on Google. Both meta titles and descriptions are used by Google to determine what your page is about, so it’s important that they accurately reflect what visitors will find when they click through the search result.
To Summarize
So there you have it: a list of seven common SEO mistakes and how they can be avoided. By familiarising yourself with these common SEO mistakes, you can actively look for ways to solve these issues and create more effective SEO campaigns.
4 Responses
Good advices, thank you for sharing!
The article is very clearly and helpful for me!!
Seo is something that needs to be done very planned. It is necessary to fulfill all the steps without skipping.
Good to be here and to read this much informative stuff, Thanks a lot for providing this great article. Nice information.