If you think SEO is how it used to be, you are utterly wrong! It’s constantly changing and a little bit too fast-paced. It is very dynamic and that is what makes it a little bit complex and enhance the risk of making mistakes unknowingly. Making those mistakes is a cause for worry, for your business growth as it affects your ledger. What can be done to curb this threat hanging over your business? Here are few things you can do to avoid failing your business SEO strategy.
A few SEO experts were interviewed recently to find out what some of the worst mistakes in this industry are. The shocking part was that a lot of these mistakes are very common; some of these are quite appealing actually. This puts people who are new in this industry at a higher risk of falling victim to them.
SEO demystified
SEO has become the cornerstone of the majority of digital marketing campaigns and is slowly becoming more of a necessity than a luxury. Because of that, some of the biggest companies resort to hiring people who will spend their entire careers focusing on bettering their SEO approaches. This manifests the importance of SEO on digital marketing campaigns and it also proves that you need to know how it all works so you can understand how mistakes happen.
SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization” and its main aim is to optimize the quality and quantity of the traffic that comes to your website through organic efforts. There are a lot of forces at play when improving your SEO campaign. Those forces include changing your site by creating unique and relevant content or using link building and keywords to drive more traffic to your site or blog.
Some people have concluded that they can easily go about their SEO campaign and as a result they have miserably failed at this. Here are a few examples of this:
Trying to trick Google into giving higher rankings for their websites
Tricking Google into giving better rankings for your websites always comes with its consequences. These consequences usually include a company using a dodgy SEO practitioner without knowing.
The root cause of this consequence is people believing that there are shortcuts to getting your website ranking amongst the best in that field. When people have this belief they don’t consider how it could result in direct and indirect issues.
One of the most dangerous direct issues includes a search engine giving your website a manual penalty. This penalty means that your website will be removed from that search engine’s listings in an instant. Trying to get it back on that search engine will require a lot of work, not only on the website itself but when trying to convince the search engine to reverse the penalty.
An indirect issue that will arise is that even if you manage to dodge the search engine’s penalty, your site will attract people who aren’t interested in your company.
Badly designed UX
Creating a good UX should always be of utmost importance in your website’s development. If you fail to create a user-friendly website, your visitors will lose interest in it fast. This means your website has to work well on mobile devices too. All internet users want to find what they’re looking for quickly on all their devices.
If your website can’t help them get what they want easily they will leave it and look for other sites that can. When these users leave your site and go back to the search engine’s search results page they create a negative reputation for it. This will tell the search engine that your website isn’t helpful.
Ben Cope from The Content Works said 4 out of 10 people who visit your site will leave it if takes longer than 3 seconds to load a page. He said that this issue is due to server-side mistakes that can be easily rectified. He also added that even the smallest improvements to your core-code will play a crucial part in bettering your web pages. This will result in more users coming to your website and increase their chances of becoming customers.
Going after competitive keywords
This mistake is hard to avoid because you have to use competitive keywords. Using these keywords can be advantageous if your site is already ranking well in search engines. If your site is still new, however, it will have a difficult time competing with sites that have been using these keywords for a long time.
You shouldn’t give up on using SEO keywords though as they’re crucial in getting you the traffic you need. The key thing here is using less popular keywords to drive more traffic to you site. Even though this might not sound like a good idea, it will help drive more traffic to your site because you won’t be competing with a lot of people. In that sense, you can catch big fish in a small pond.
To put this into perspective let’s say you offer car hiring services, this means you’ll want to want to use the keyword “car for hire”. This keyword, however, will reveal many car hiring services; this won’t be good for your business as it won’t help it stand out. What could make it stand out is using lesser-used keywords. For example, let’s say your car hiring service is in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. To drive more traffic into your website in this scenario it’ll be a good idea to use keywords like “car for hire Los Angeles” and “car for hire Santa Monica”. These keywords won’t just increase your business’ rankings they’ll also increase your chances of meeting with paying clients.
Buying backlink
Backlinks play a crucial role in improving how your website will rank in search engines. This is because they make it easier for the search engines to spot trusted sites. A handful of companies did find out about this though and started paying SEO agencies to create content that had links to their websites. Google found out about this though and released the Penguin update in 2012. Some companies still offer paid backlinks and it will only be a matter of time before they’re caught too. You wouldn’t want your website to be associated with these companies then because Google might completely blacklist your website as they did to other sites in the past.
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