Biggest SEO Mistakes and How To Avoid Them
Having a solid SEO strategy is a must, but it is not an easy task to accomplish. There are many misconceptions and controversies regarding which SEO strategies work and which are just a waste of time. In this article, we will be talking about the most significant SEO mistakes and how to avoid them.
Biggest SEO Mistakes
1. Neglecting keyword research
According to a study, more than 90% of websites don’t get organic traffic from Google. It is because they don’t do keyword research, and their whole website relies on random content, hoping it will generate traffic. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works, and you will have to work to get the traffic. Sometimes websites partly do keyword research, let’s say, and they try to optimize their website and rank for generic keywords, which won’t bring the desired results. Imagine being a newly established company in the clothing industry and trying to rank for ‘women’s clothes.’ Impossible, right? With all these already well-established fashion brands being your competitors.
How to avoid this:
You must do keyword research to avoid this mistake. It’s a process of understanding your target clients’ language to search for your goods, services, and information. Find the words in your industry that have search traffic potential and focus on them instead of publishing random content. Be consistent with it.
2. Not building enough backlinks.
Backlinks play an essential role in how Google ranks your website. Sometimes the only reason the site is not ranking high is that it does not have enough links from other websites. If you search for any term, you will see that the websites on top results have many backlinks or even TONS of links. Sometimes brands try to take a shortcut and buy backlinks which usually backfires for them because having quality backlinks is just as important as the number of backlinks.
How to avoid this:
Well, the first and most important thing you can do is to create unique and high-quality content that will be able to generate organic backlinks. That might be quite challenging initially, so you can also reach out to websites related to your specific industry that can benefit from linking to your product or service. Offering to publish guest articles for a backlink is also a good idea. You have endless options for how to generate more backlinks. Just avoid buying them.
3. Having a slow website
With today’s fast-pacing life having a slow website just won’t cut it. Search engines favor speedy websites that navigate from one page to another seamlessly. That’s what website visitors prefer as well. If they wait for your website to load, they will click away and try to find an alternative. Google will favor your site more the faster it loads, particularly now that the page experience ranking element is gradually being used.
How to avoid this:
Well, many factors might slow down your website. A good start would be checking out the Google PageSpeed Insight tool, which will let you know whether or not your website is slow and give you a summary of the steps you can take to improve the website’s speed. Optimizing the size of the images used on the website is another way to fix this problem since images slow down the website in many instances.
4. Neglecting meta descriptions and skipping image/title tags
Meta descriptions might seem irrelevant and unnecessary; you might neglect them and skip writing them. Well, that would be a massive mistake from an SEO standpoint. Not adding meta descriptions or image and title tags means your content loses a huge potential. Meta descriptions are written in search engines’ language, making it easier for them to rank the website.
How to avoid this:
Always write quality meta descriptions, and don’t skip adding images and title tags. Let search engines know what exactly your website is and improve your performance.
5. Targeting only high-traffic keywords
High-traffic keywords, as the term says, are the words many people are searching for; therefore, they bring a lot of traffic to the website. Of course, this is a known fact for everyone in each industry, so everyone is trying to optimize and use these words to rank higher. But the problem is that when there are a lot of already well-established companies on the market that are targeting these words, it’s petty hard for new or less-known companies to rank higher than those big ones. Therefore, only focusing on high-traffic terms can be a waste of time.
How to avoid this:
You should target a keyword if you know it is crucial to your website and can generate revenue. But gradually work your way up to those difficult terms. First, prioritize the keywords you can rank using your knowledge and resources and are less competitive.
If you’re not sure how to determine whether the keyword is high-traffic or not, you can use tools like SEMrush, which will tell you how competitive the specific term is.
6. Not focusing on content enough.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that content is king. You can have an excellent SEO strategy from a technical viewpoint, but if your content is low quality and doesn’t provide any value to the reader, all that work is wasted. People turn to search engines to find answers to their questions. Therefore, they’re expecting you to provide reliable, straight-to-the-point answers from you. To determine what your website is about and whether you can deliver the solution users are seeking, Google requires good content from you. When you have only published a couple of phrases about a subject, you cannot expect Google to see you as an authority on the subject.
How to avoid this:
Focus on writing original and informative content. Ensure your content is grammatically correct and has at least 300 words. Make sure to have well-structured content, so it’s easy for the reader to navigate your website. Establish on-site content hierarchy and assign appropriate headings.
7. Not making the website mobile-friendly
According to google statistics, in the US, 63% of the organic search traffic is from mobile devices. That should be enough information to make you realize just how important making your website mobile-friendly is. By default, Google is now using mobile-first indexing, so it considers your site’s mobile version when determining where you should rank. Therefore, your results will be affected even if your desktop site is well configured, but your mobile site isn’t at all responsive.
How to avoid this:
Well, the solution to this problem is pretty straightforward: ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. You will need developers for that, but it’s not a super tricky or unreachable task. You can check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not using Google’s mobile-friendly test.
Conclusion
Yes, SEO is a lot of work, and it’s understandable if many brands don’t want to put that much effort into something that won’t show results instantly. Still, if you want your business to succeed in long-term perspectives, then SEO is something you want to be focusing on. Don’t try to take shortcuts because sooner or later, they will backfire. Think of SEO as a marathon rather than a sprint and as a goal rather than a collection of afterthought tricks performed on content. Even though you’ve learned about the biggest SEO mistakes, there are still many more. Avoiding these mistakes can be difficult, especially for someone not specialized in SEO. Therefore to avoid them, you need the help of SEO specialists. Internet Marketing Geeks is what you need in this situation. A team of professionals who know SEO’s ins and outs can guarantee your business will never make these SEO mistakes again.
