In this digital world, with more and more people relying on search engines to find products, and learn about brands, often search engines have the power to decide which website a potential customer should access.
Hence, businesses worldwide race towards optimizing their website for search engines. But, in the optimization process of keeping up with the SEO demands and trends, they often practice some common mistakes.
No, there is nothing wrong with it. All professional and experienced marketers have been there, committing some blunders before mastering the SEO skills. SEO is one such strategy you may implement in a few weeks, but it will take more time to master it.
Plus, SEO is not a one-time job. You have to constantly learn and adjust your SEO strategies according to current trends to rank on top of the SERP. So, understanding SEO and how it works is crucial to improve your rankings, drive traffic and increase your sales.
Now before mastering the SEO skills, first, let’s understand the common SEO mistakes to avoid. That will help you avoid any potential blunders while optimizing your website for search engines.
The Most Common SEO Mistakes
1. Not Having Proper SEO Strategy
Business owners often hear about SEO and its importance these days, and they start running SEO campaigns without having appropriate goals. All they want is to get ranked on top of the SERP, thereby driving massive traffic and increasing sales. However, it is not as simple as it sounds.
You must set your SEO goals first if you want your SEO efforts to bring significant results. What exactly are you trying to achieve? Do you want to drive relevant traffic, quality leads, or increased sales?
Sometimes you will have more than one goal. You may want all three of those goals, like more traffic, more conversions, and increased sales. Define your SEO goals precisely and start working towards them.
What is the use of driving irrelevant traffic that will not give you any conversions? Or, what is the point in driving high-quality traffic to a poorly designed website? In either case, you will not get any sales.
Thus, having a robust SEO strategy is crucial to make your SEO efforts work for you and not against you. Else, it will take your business nowhere. Most small businesses have failed to understand the concept of SEO, getting lost amidst the corporate giants and other competitors.
No worries. Better late than ever. You can start defining your SEO goals now. That will help you derive suitable SEO strategies to achieve your SEO goals perfectly.
2. Ignoring Analytics
Businesses often tend to focus on keywords that bring them the most traffic. But they end up not ranking for those highly competitive and high-traffic keywords. Thus, businesses should also focus on lower-traffic keywords because they are more particular and can get you on top of SERP, driving you a few sales.
You can always use analytics to set up conversion tracking for your keyword phrases. Then, you can analyze and compare those phrases and find out which one is yielding you the best results. Thus, you can focus on those keywords and optimize your website accordingly rather than competing with high-competitive keywords.
3. Not Optimizing for Local Searches
It is crucial to optimize your business for local audiences, especially if you run a business that serves customers in a specific city or region. With “near me searches” gaining momentum from audiences, Google-like search engines prioritize such phrases.
Plus, search engines handle those local keywords differently from the global keywords. Hence, it is vital to have your business location, contact numbers on your pages like header or footer. Thus, your business will show up on the local results page. Last but not least, get your business listed on Google My Business, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Foursquare, and other location-based sites and review networks.
4. Ignoring Mobile Optimization
Smartphones are handy and enable people to shop on the go. With more and more people preferring shopping online with their smartphones, Google tends to favor mobile-friendly websites. Thus, with the increased use of smartphones, mobile optimization has become mandatory more than ever now.
Hence, optimizing your website for mobile phones must be part of your SEO strategy. Mobile optimization involves making sure your website is responsive and loads fast. They are the prime ranking factors as internet users often prefer user-friendly and responsive websites. Thus, you can increase organic traffic for your website by optimizing it for mobile phones.
5. Skipping Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Optimizing your website does not end with incorporating keywords and enhancing the content alone. You need to work on other essential SEO elements also, including title tags and meta descriptions. Skipping them can affect your website ranking dramatically.
Yes, search engines consider title tags and meta descriptions while crawling your website. Thus, optimizing them is mandatory to improve your ranking as well as your content performance. Also, using schema to mark up your content is inevitable to reveal the context of your website to the search engines.
Only when search engines understand the context of your content, your content stands valuable. Else, your website may rank lower in searches and also cannot make it through voice searches.
Likewise, forgetting image tags is also another common mistake. The alt tags of the visuals you include in your content are crucial as it plays a vital role in attracting the target audience for that specific article. Search engines cannot identify the pictures, but they can read the alt tags and add the information like they index your pages.
So, always write unique and descriptive title tags for each page and incorporate keywords naturally in your content. All these SEO elements can help you collectively to rank on top of the SERP.
6. Missing Quality Links
When it comes to placing links, always focus on quality rather than quantity. A single link from a popular blog can help you with search engine rankings rather than using many low-quality directory links. They may be harder to get, but search engines often prefer quality over quantity. Quality links indicate the quality of your website as well.
Hence, always focus on using links that are relevant to your website and business niche. Limit your outgoing links and keep it bare minimum. Also, avoid any links that redirect to adult content like pharmacies, gambling sites, and more. Use free tools like SEOquake to check the strength of the domain and incoming links to the page.
7. Skipping Anchor Text for Internal Links
Anchor text plays an essential factor in the SEO health of your website. Thus, making it relevant rather than generic text is crucial. Using generic text on links like click here, read more cannot help you from an SEO perspective.
Anchor text not only helps you in search engine ranking. But, it also directs your readers where they can find more information on that specific topic. Thus, using customized and tailored anchor text relevant to the content is crucial to enhance SEO.
To be precise, if you want to add a link to your website development services page in your blog post, do so by adding appropriate anchor text. You can make the anchor text like"website design and development services" or something relevant. That way, users can quickly understand, and also it helps with SEO. Besides, you can also include a call to action if you want the user to perform some action.
8. Not Creating Quality Content
Google prioritizes quality content that delivers value to the users. Thus, publishing high-quality content is a surefire way to get your website ranked on top of the SERP.
Hence, using poor-quality write-ups, spinning articles, and plagiarism is a big no. They will affect the SEO health of your website dramatically. Moreover, people will quickly judge your website and business if your content is duplicate or not good enough.
So, always dedicate time to write quality articles or spend money and hire experienced writers to write quality write-ups for your website. It is the investment you do for your business today. That can help you get a lot more conversions in the future.
9. Focusing More on Search Engines
Some marketers often get lost in the technicalities of SEO by constantly working towards convincing search engines. But, SEO is not about search engines. It is all about improving the experience of the users/website visitors. So, if you work towards improving your website, its content and make it more responsive and valuable for your users, the SEO will automatically kick-off.
Instead, if you solely focus on search engines and optimize your website accordingly, often, you may drive irrelevant or ineffective leads that barely result in a conversion. Poor SEO practices or focusing solely on search engines include over-stuffing keywords, creating complicated websites, and not using responsive design. That will not take you anywhere.
Thus, always focus on user experience first. Write straightforward and easy-to-understand text rather than stuffing the sentences with keywords. Using an interactive and responsive design with easy-to-navigate options will enrich the user experience on your website.
Of course, it is vital to create your titles, headings as per search engines. They can help you rank, but still, visitors come first. Publishing informative and valuable content on user-friendly pages will help the users with the information they need, and it will also help you build links in the future.
As you build links, you will eventually start climbing rank for the target keywords on your pages. Along with a positive UX, you will rank better in search engines, for sure.
10. Not updating with The SEO Trends
SEO is not a one-time job, and the Seo trends keep changing. So, businesses need to focus on the current digital marketing and SEO trends watchfully. Thus, they can update their SEO strategies according to the current SEO trends and get ranked on SERP.
New trends keep emerging in the digital marketing field often. For instance, a few years before, voice searches were not in practice. But with everyone preferring voice searches over text searches today, you have to update your website SEO according to voice-based searches. Else, your website will become obsolete.
So, what was a trend yesterday may not be the trend today, and what is the trend today may not be so tomorrow. Thus, you need to constantly update and work on your SEO as per current trends.
Final Thoughts
In this digital era, SEO is not an option anymore. When people find your business through search engines, you need to have your website and content in a language that search engines understand the best.
While optimizing the businesses for search engines, business owners tend to make many flaws. They often get obsessed with SEO and make more blunders than actually optimizing their website. In this blog, we have listed such common mistakes that we often see on the internet.
Thus, you can avoid such mistakes and actively work on optimizing your website for search engines. However, if it is too much for you to handle along with your business commitments, you can always approach reputed SEO professionals.
If you are looking for SEO experts who can optimize your website for search engines, you have arrived at the right place. At Cypherox Technologies, we have a dedicated SEO team that has mastered the current SEO trends and strategies. Reach us for hassle-free SEO services and get your website done to attract your potential customers, thereby increasing your sales.
