The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Optimizing your website and blog is an essential element of your content marketing strategy. While SEO is changing, it stays on top of marketers’ agendas as it is a powerful way to bring visitors to your company’s outlets and to direct them towards your sales funnel.
Content marketing means attracting and transforming prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. The purpose of content marketing is to help companies create sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers, as well as create willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing usually does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience
SEO methods are constantly evolving due to search engines’ developments and users’ changing perspectives. It is not that easy to stay on top of the most successful optimization techniques, with many businesses falling into the trap of incorrectly doing SEO. Instead of seeing massive traffic and increasing conversion rates, the results can be quite the opposite.
There are some common SEO mistakes that are tough to avoid. Testing optimization approaches is also difficult because you can’t verify your methods in real-time since search engines’ rules are becoming hard to predict.While the optimization field is ever-evolving, some practices are proving effective, while others are harmful in the long run. Let’s review the top ten common SEO mistakes you should avoid so your business’ website will bring the desired results to match your efforts.
1. Choosing The Wrong Keyword
Optimizing is all about the keywords that you want your website to rank for. But are you are choosing the right ones?
One of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords is neglecting the
preference of search engines and users for long-tail keywords. While you
might define your products and services in a certain way, it’s more
important to understand what words your potential customers would use to
refer to them. Sometimes the terms you consider correct might mean
something completely different for other people, or could be too
generic. In either case, you will be optimizing for all the wrong
keywords.
It’s best to do your background research carefully before you start the optimization. Using tools like the Google AdWords KeywordPlanner, Google Trends, SEMrush and Moz Keyword Explorer can help immensely in putting your finger on the pulse of trending and adequate keywords.
2. Using Keyword Stuffing
You might think using your target keywords in every sentence of your
content would boost your ratings. That strategy couldn’t be more wrong.
In fact, going overboard with using keywords is registered as spammy by search engines, which means it actually hurts your SEO performance.
That’s why keyword ‘stuffing,’ or overusing your intended keywords, is
not crucial to your SEO success. Such an approach would make your
content unnatural and useless for its intended audience. In fact, Google
is employing a special semantic search called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).
This program can recognize your content’s topic without the need for
stuffing your content with repetitions of your target keywords.
3. Creating Content That's Not About Your Keyword
Another common pitfall in SEO optimization is producing content that is
not actually about your keywords. The problem is that you want to rank
for a certain keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your target
topic. Search engines like Google want to serve their users with the
most relevant content for people’s search terms. Thus, if your content
does not answer user needs, it won’t rank well.
This mistake is often a result of trying to fit a few different topics
within a single piece of content, creating low-quality work just for the
sake of including keywords, or optimizing for multiple keywords in one
article. Your primary goal should be to produce content that truly
corresponds to the questions and needs of your target audience,
including using the right search terms. Then search engines will be able
to trace your content as matching the keyword you are optimizing for.
4. Publishing Non-Original Content
This next typical mistake is related to the quality of your content.
While duplicating texts was a common practice back in the day, today
search engines penalize this approach. Copying and plagiarizing content
is seen as a spammy practice and is highly discouraged.
Duplicate and thin content simply doesn’t work.
Instead of ripping off copy from other places or using software that
‘spins’ the content into a new shape, it’s worth investing in creating
original and meaningful texts. This is the only way to make sure your
website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed in the back of search results.
5. Skipping Title Tags and Meta Description
Optimizing your content does not finish once you include a target
keyword in your articles. Title tags and meta descriptions are essential
elements of SEO that should not be forgotten. Skipping them means a huge missed potential
for your content. These optimizing factors are considered by search
engines when crawling your website, so if properly done, they can
improve the performance of your content.
Another technical detail that content marketers sometimes forget is
including image tags. The alt tags of the visuals you include in your
content are important, as they are another sign of how you are targeting
articles. Search bots cannot see the pictures – but they can read the
alt tags and add this information in the way they index your pages.
6. Missing Quality Link
To get the best from SEO, content marketers today should grasp that the
quality of external links included in content is more important than
their quantity. That’s why it’s better to make sure you link to
relevant, well-ranking websites with solid reputations – not just any
site. It’s also useful to link back to sites that have linked to you, as
this brings back traffic in the future.
Another counterproductive practice when it comes to links is using
ineffective anchor text. This wastes precious SEO opportunities, as the
anchor texts signify to the reader and to search bots what the link is
about and how it can be beneficial to users. Thus, avoid using ‘click
here’ as an anchor text and make sure you opt for a variety of anchor
texts, as employing the same text over and over again can be seen as
spammy.
7. Going Astray with Yout Internal Link
There are also common mistakes when including internal links that you
should watch out for. Naturally, it’s important to think about your
top-performing pages and consider placing links to them in your content.
This is a way to give them visibility and create additional traction.
But make sure you don’t include internal links just for the sake of
having them in an article if they don’t match the topic and focus of the
piece.
As with keyword stuffing, it’s crucial to watch out and not overdo
internal linking. If the content and links seem unnatural, the work will
not be appreciated by your target customers. It would not be favorably
treated by search engines either, as it can be seen as a fraudulent
practice.
8. Not Investing in a Fast and Mobile Friendly Experience
SEO optimization is not only about content and keywords. It’s also about
the quality of your website, particularly its performance on mobile
devices, which are users’ top choice today. Google and other search
engines can recognize when your website is not mobile-friendly (think
about the Mobilegeddon update).
If you haven’t considered a smooth mobile experience for your audience,
your rating on search engines can be jeopardized. The same goes for load
speed, as search engines put an emphasis on that as well. You shouldn’t
be surprised if a slow website leads to lower SERP. You can use online
tools like Pingdom and GT Metrix to analyze where the speed problems come from and how to fix them.
9. Not Using The Power Of Influences for Social Media Interaction
Optimization has a social dimension as well. When you are sharing your
content on social media, one of your main goals is to get the attention
of users who have a significant online influence. This means their
content gets noticed by both your target audience and by search engines.
That’s why it’s important to create relationships with such ‘power users’ and to use their credibility to promote your content.
Another aspect of this is submitting your blog posts or website promo to
social sites such as Digg, Reddit, or Quora without having a ‘power
user.’ It’s much easier to make noise about your content when the user
sharing it has credibility on that network. Building relationships and
doing structured outreach via influencers is an indispensable part of
your optimization strategy.
10. Forgetting About Analytics
Last but not least, the only way to know if your SEO optimization and
content efforts work is to track their progress. Many marketers would
disregard the numbers, but this is a serious mistake. Setting up and
regularly reviewing your analytics is essential for your optimization
results.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are just two of the main
tools you can use to measure and get an overview of your website’s
performance. With their help, you can see how your optimization is
working for the different kinds of content and using various strategies
you are trying out.
Search engine optimization is an indispensable part of any content
marketing strategy today. While you can find plenty of advice online,
making a number of typical SEO mistakes is quite common. Instead, it’s
better to get well acquainted with the challenges that others have
experienced and avoid them in your marketing efforts. These ten errors
have proven quite widespread, so they are now easier to recognize before
you make them.
