SEO is a crucial skill for any business owner or marketer to master. However, SEO best practices and strategies are constantly changing, and it can be difficult to stay up to date.
If you’re not careful, your SEO strategies may be hurting your traffic and conversions instead of helping them. Here are some of the top SEO mistakes to watch out for:
Only Publishing Short-Form Content
You’re probably well aware of the importance of blogging for SEO and customer engagement.
However, if you’re only publishing 500-word articles, you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to increase your traffic. A study by Backlino found that the average first-page result in Google is 1890 words long. One theory is that longer posts boost the topical relevancy for that page- making it easier for Google to understand what your post is about. Of course, longer content also tends to generate more social shares than shorter content which is likely to impact the search results as well.
While long-form content is excellent for SEO, it’s also a good way to position you as an authority on a particular subject. This helps build trust among your prospects and customers.
Forgetting About Website Audits
The goal of a website audit is to review the performance of your website- keeping both Google and your target customer in mind.
Some of the questions you’re aiming to ask with these audits include:
- Is your site easy to navigate?
- Can visitors easily find relevant information?
- Is your bounce rate reasonable?
- How fast is your site loading?
- Is your site mobile friendly?
- How quickly does the mobile version take to launch?
- Are any of your page titles missing or duplicated?
- Does your site crawl return errors?
- Are your images optimized to reduce load time?
- Does your site structure make sense?
- Are you using HTTPS?
These are just a few questions that a comprehensive audit will help you answer. Perform these audits regularly to ensure your website is as healthy as possible.
Ignoring the Numbers
SEO is about two things: Traffic, and conversions. Every action you take should be with the aim of improving one or both of these things.
That’s why it’s so important to keep track of your metrics- so you can see when and where improvements can be made.
All decisions you make should ideally be driven by data. For example, you might find that you’re focusing all your attention on high-traffic keywords and ignoring those that bring low traffic. But the keywords with lower traffic may have higher conversion rates because they’re more specific or show greater intent. Getting on the first page of Google for those keywords may drive more sales than the keywords that typically drive more traffic.
You can use Google Analytics to see how your leads are finding your website, where they’re coming from, and what they’re doing once they’re on your site. You can also see which keywords are the most successful for your target customers.
Buying Backlinks
The more sites that link to your website the better… right? Wrong. Unfortunately, some businesses are still buying backlinks, which is considered to be Black Hat SEO and a good way to get pinged by Google.
Often, these sites have already been flagged for being spammy and other shady practices. Any sites that they link to will appear on Google’s radar, and links from them will do more harm than good.
A few high-ranking, good quality links are much better than hundreds of paid links from low ranking websites. If you’re looking for links back to your site, write quality content, form relationships with other businesses in your industry, and encourage your readers to share your content on social media.
Forgetting About Internal Links
Sure, backlinks are important. But without a solid internal link structure, both your site visitors and the search engines will find it difficult to navigate your site.
Internally linking within your site will help Google to understand page relevancy and make it easy for it to crawl your website- so every page will be indexed.
While good internal linking is important for SEO, it’s also helpful for your prospects and customers. When you direct them from one helpful blog post to the next, or from a product tutorial to the purchase page for that product, you’ll keep them on your site for longer and increase your conversions.
Are you lost when it comes to SEO? We’ve got the expertise you need. Get in touch today to learn more.