Search engine optimization makes the online world go ‘round. Without it, you’re missing out on valuable organic traffic. It’s also a finicky beast. Between on-page and technical SEO, backlinks, mobile-friendly and accessible design, and submitting an accurate site map SEO has a lot of moving parts. Don’t be discouraged though. If you know the most common mistakes others make, you can conquer the algorithm in no time.
The first step of any marketing strategy is to know your target audience. After all, there’s no such thing as a commercial product that’s for everyone. For successful SEO, that means understanding the nuances of how your customers behave online.
With SEO, it’s not a good idea to fly by the seat of your pants. You’ll need an SEO strategy and training on SEO best practices for everyone involved.
To start building an SEO strategy, look at where your site and results are now and where you want it to be. Then set realistic goals and decide how you plan to accomplish them.
As you make your plan:
As a content marketer, it’s easy to get so focused on trying to rank for a keyword that the helpfulness of your content falls by the wayside. Search engines don’t only check your keyword use. They also check if your content actually answers the user’s search query. If your content doesn’t provide any answers, it won’t rank well no matter how effectively you use your keywords.
This mistake could be a result of:
Your primary goal should be to produce content that is genuinely helpful to your target audience. The keywords and search engine ranking are to get more eyes on that helpful content.
Search engines penalize duplicate content. If it’s copied from someone else, it’s plagiarism. If it’s copied from your own content it’s spammy.
Title tags and meta descriptions are easy to add and make a huge difference in your content ranking. They help search engine web crawlers understand the context of your content and decide if it’s relevant . Alt tags on images describe what’s happening in the picture so people who use screen readers for low vision can understand them. Search engines prioritize sites that have them over ones that don’t due to ADA compliance, but they’re also the only way crawlers can include images in their analysis of a piece of content.
The quality of the external sites you link to tells the crawlers how reputable your site is. That’s why it’s better to link to relevant, well-ranking websites with solid reputations and to link back to sites that have linked to you for more future traffic.
Ineffective anchor text can also negatively affect how crawlers see your site. The anchor text tells the crawlers what the link is about. If they don’t match or your links are attached to a bunch of “click here”s, they’ll probably think you’re spamming.
Internal links to other content on your website boost your search ranking, but you can’t just plop them where they don’t fit for the sake of having them. Like keyword stuffing, overdoing internal linking can do more harm than good. If the content and links aren’t a good fit, your target customers and search engines alike probably won’t appreciate it.
As you’ve probably figured out by now, SEO isn’t just about content and keywords. It’s also about your website’s quality. That’s why search engines consider how your site performs on mobile devices.
The biggest SEO mistakes for mobile user experience include:
Not Understanding How SEO Works Across Digital Channels
SEO doesn’t only matter on the Google SERP. It affects most if not all channels of digital marketing.
Not integrating your SEO with other marketing channels like social media, email, and paid ads means you will miss out on reaching your full SEO potential.
To see if your optimization efforts are paying off, you have to track their progress by setting up and regularly reviewing your analytics. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the standard for monitoring your website’s performance, but there are also alternatives like Moz and SEMrush.
Solutions could be:
Here at Sav, we want small businesses to succeed online. That starts with a beautiful, professional website. Our responsive platforms and SEO features make it easy to get started with the basics of SEO so your efforts can be better spent. Start building with us today!