3 Common SEO Mistakes That You Might Be Making – What to Know
Continuously working on optimizing your website and blog is integral to the success of your content marketing strategy. Given that SEO rules are ever-evolving due to internal developments in search engines and changing user behavior, every business that wants to get ahead of their competitors must learn how to adapt accordingly. However, it’s not always easy to stay on top of the most recent optimization techniques, leading to many businesses incorrectly doing SEO. Even though they do everything needed to optimize their site, they’re not seeing their expected spike in traffic and conversion rates. The culprit? Falling prey to an SEO mistake.
Everybody commits SEO blunders, including seasoned marketers. Experimenting with optimization approaches isn’t always practical because it’s difficult to verify the results right away—couple that with the fact that search engine algorithms are getting harder and harder to predict.
But even if this is the case, there are still some tested and proven practices that prove to be useful as well as common mistakes that can hurt your content strategy. Here are some SEO mistakes you should keep in mind, along with advice on how to correct them.
Not optimizing for local search
If you own a business that caters to customers within a specific area, it would serve you best to utilize local search to target them. Search engines tend to tackle local search differently, so this tactic may require a separate strategy. You may kick start your efforts by including region-specific keywords in your page titles and meta descriptions. It would also help if you add your business address and phone numbers on your site, including the header or footer, so you can show up on local search results. Another thing that can help is listing your business on location-based sites and apps like Yelp, Google Places, and Four Square. To further optimize your local search strategy, your best bet is to hire an SEO agency that can recommend the best course of action.
Failure to use analytics to figure out what converts
SEO isn’t merely about yielding tons of traffic. As a business, you would want to monetize this traffic and gain conversions. You might be focusing too hard on keeping tabs of keywords that send you the most traffic and then get disappointed when you fail to rank for competitive keywords. But more often than not, it’s the lower-traffic phrases that tend to convert better because they’re more specific. They’ll give you more chances of landing the coveted first page of search engines. The only way you’ll find out if this tactic works for you is by tracking it. You can use an analytics dashboard that can help you stay on top of your keyword phrases, as well as compare them against each other to discover which ones produce the best results. Knowing what works will help you fine tune your strategy and determine which efforts are worth focusing on and which ones you should give up on.
Prioritising quantity over quality
While it’s important to have a high volume of links, your focus should not be on quantity, but quality. A single link from a famous and highly-relevant blog can help boost your rankings better than a bevvy of low-quality directory links. While links from popular sites are harder to get, but search engines find them credible, so they’re also a more reliable measure of the quality of your site. For links, a good tip would be to focus on those that are relevant to your site and industry, those that do not have a ton of outgoing links, and those that do not contain links to adult, pharmacy, or gambling sites. If you cannot build quality back links yourself, hiring an SEO company is the way to go.
Wrapping up
The listed SEO mistakes are easy to avoid, so long as you keep them in mind. But if you find that your SEO strategy is still not getting you the traffic and conversions you need despite avoiding these common mistakes, you’re better off hiring and seeking help from a reputable SEO agency like Incredible SEO. Get in touch with us to see how we can work together.
