There is no doubt about it; good SEO is vital to the success of your website and internet business. Getting noticed on search engines can be difficult, therefore, if you want your website to grow organic traffic, it is important for companies to master SEO or run the risk of missing out on leads and conversions. A good SEO strategy has the potential to take your business to new heights. Today, SEO is the focus on reaching out to and connecting with prospective buyers and consumers alike. But like most things in the digital marketing world, some companies are better at SEO than others. Because of its complexity and ever-evolving nature, SEO mistakes can easily be done without even realizing it. Even experts who work with blogs and web content regularly require constant refreshers on the topic. As with any mistake, the first step is becoming aware of them. So, here are the 5 common SEO mistakes that are hurting your search engine page ranking.
- Having No, Or a Poor Keyword Strategy
Just like you need to figure out your product niche, business model, and sales road-maps, you need to approach your SEO and keyword strategy in the same way. Because SEO is so tricky, it can potentially suck hours of productive time from you or your staff and deliver nothing in return unless you approach what keywords you would like to target properly. The foundation of a good keyword strategy is based on a target audience, goals, and tactics. Picking a few keywords without strategy or any thought, and creating content and web pages around those keywords is simply creating “stuff”. There is no shortage of “stuff” on the internet.
You can start by establishing a clear empathy with the audience your business intends on serving. The process of uncovering their pain-points is one of the best ways to discover potential keywords through their own experiences, and most importantly, in their own words. Approaching this with the mindset of keywords and SEO will only help you craft a clear offer to your audience, as well as help you position yourself as a thought leader within your industry. Once you have defined your buying audience your focus becomes very simple – improving traffic and conversions. Make sure you have some way of measuring traffic from organic traffic like Google Analytics. Try setting some benchmarks here based on things like seasonality, conversions and how many leads you captured for your sales team.
Finally, you need to decide what kind of keywords or phrases you are going to be focusing on. The keywords you choose will define your entire approach to SEO; to picking topics for your content, to your website’s URL structure. Here, you can use any number of tools (my personal favourite is Google Keyword Planner), to get an understanding of these keywords and phrases search volume. After that, you must decide what kind of keywords or phrases you will be targeting? Did you select high volume keywords? If that’s the case, these keywords are more competitive and will take a longer time to see any improvement in your rank. Did you go for high quality or long tail keywords? These can deliver a greater return in the short run. Whatever your choice here is, you need to use the right keywords and phrases which connects your target audience with your web content.
One more thing. SEO and keywords is an ongoing process, and your strategy and goals should be evaluated every 90 days. The last thing you want is to meet your goals, but not achieve success.
- Creating Content For The Sake Of It
So-called experts will often tell you that “Content Is King” and will encourage you to create and post content all the time. While creating and posting content often enough might get you some attention, unless it is amazing, it will fall by the wayside. Low-value content will not help you create an audience, add subscribers to your newsletters or generate leads of much quality for your sales team. It can also harm your SEO efforts. Although Google has more than 200 ranking signals, as far as content is concerned, Google will consider your webpage length and webpage quality. Take a look at your website pages as well as your blog. Do you have any pages with duplicate content? How about pages with very little content? What about pages or blog posts with no call to action? Well, if you found any, you can guarantee Google has found them too!
The first thing you should do with pages with poor or very little content is to non-index them. While this may sound counter-intuitive – generally speaking with SEO you want Google to see your pages – there is a good reason to non-index some of your pages as it will help your SEO. This was recently stated by a Google employee, who said that “fewer but better quality pages than it will result in better quality traffic from Google.” If you aren’t sure how to start here, go to the Google search page, and type “site:YOURWEBSITEDOMAIN”. Google will show you approximately how many pages it has indexed. This may be a tedious process depending on how many hundreds (or thousands) of your website pages Google has indexed, but try looking for pages with expired promotions, or any job openings you are no longer looking to fill. Deleting or non-indexing those pages will really boost your SEO efforts in the long run.
Your next step is to define a content calendar. Taking into consideration your target audience’s pain-points and questions, in addition to the keywords and phrases you have decided to target, start building content around these issues with a 12-month outlook. Coming up with topics well in advance will only help you publish better content, as you will have weeks and months to prepare for it. As far as length is considered, given what we discussed above, Google seems to prefer longer content as opposed to shorter content. What this means is, any content that you publish targeting your audience and your keywords and phrases should be at least 1200-1500 words. Anything less than that won’t reap too many benefits as far as search engine page ranks are concerned. When it comes to determining your content’s length, try searching for your keyword or phrase in Google, and click on the first five results. Get a word count from each page and average that. This will give you a good idea of how long your content should be.
Finally, always focus on quality first. If you are struggling to put together a blog post or a white-paper that will blow your readers away, put it on the shelf. You can always come back to it at a later date with a different mindset, and apply those finishing touches that will dazzle your audience. You can read more about some crafty content marketing tips for busy IR professionals here.
- Not Optimizing Your Images and PDF’s
Images can make your website picture perfect. However, if your images are not optimized correctly, you will make your website visitors and Google hate your website. In turn, this will hurt your SEO. As with everything else in life, you need to balance your images quality and file size to meet your marketing needs and website performance. Avoid using GIF’s whenever possible as they are usually of poor quality. If you are using JPG or PNG files, use a filter that compresses the data. Your goal here should be to reduce the file size without giving up too much of the image quality. If you are using WordPress, you have a couple of options to deal with this. WP Smush is my go-to plugin when it comes to compressing images. Using Lazy Load will also improve your sites speed, as it hides images below the fold, and will only display as users scroll further down the page where the images are placed.
Next up are image alt-tags and title tags; these should be considered essential to any image you use on your website as it helps give Google context about what is in the image. A good image tag may look something like this “Avoid These SEO Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Search Engine Page Ranking”. Although adding tags to every image on your website can take some time, it shouldn’t be overlooked. Whenever you are using images on a blog post, or a lead generation webpage, include your keyword phrases in the alt tag at the very least. If your image is simply a placeholder, meaning it doesn’t really have a purpose, then you can leave the alt and title tags blank.
Finally, PDF’s can be a great way to provide users with valuable information about your services and can be easily downloaded. But one of their drawbacks is that PDF files are not tracked by Google Analytics. Most importantly, if someone finds your PDF online via a search, they will end up missing your menu bar and homepage. If you must use PDF’s make sure that it is properly optimized. When saving your PDF, include your keyword or phrases in the file title, the URL and add a brief synopsis in the PDF subject. These three items will show up on Google Search results and will give your audience (and Google) an idea about what this file is about. Lastly, keep the file size small so it doesn’t take too long to load. Since we are on the topic of load time,
- Poor Website Performance and User Experience on Desktop and/or Mobile
Did you know that half of your website’s visitors will leave your website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds? The internet moves at the speed of light, therefore, so should your website. Having too many unnecessary plugins, images, or videos on your homepage or any key landing pages is going to punish your search engine page rankings. Whenever a user leaves bounces from your website, it sends a signal to Google that they didn’t find what they were looking for on your website. So, make sure that your website is performing at par with the internet audience’s expectations. SEO Tester Online is my go-to tool to when testing a website’s performance for SEO. The test result page will give you a checklist of items your webmaster or digital marketing specialist will need to address.
The next thing you need to consider is user experience. This would include things like having a secured site (https:// as opposed to http://) and providing a simple navigation through the various levels on your website. Complex website hierarchy require many clicks so if it is possible you can combine two or three pages for the same keyword or phrase into a single comprehensive piece. If you are managing a large site, such as an e-commerce site, in particular, using forms or filters as opposed to deep linking may just well be a better navigation menu for your users. Keeping the number of levels on your site limited will make it easier for Google to crawl and will increase the PageRank of your important pages. Keeping your site navigation simple will also keep your site visitors happy and increase engagement.
Lastly, I cannot end this segment without discussing mobile. More and more users are using their mobile phones to perform Google Searches; therefore, your website must be suited to display and perform properly on mobile devices. As discussed earlier in this article, compressing images and files such as PDF’s, getting rid of unnecessary plugins or scripts that are hurting your page load speed, and having a simple navigation are key to finding success with mobile SEO.
- Inferior Backlink Quality
Backlinks are vital for improving your search engine page rankings. Yet, not all backlinks are created equal. Having a handful of backlinks from a popular blog or news-site is going to do more for your SEO than one hundred backlinks from low-quality directories. You should NEVER pay for backlinks to your site as this tactic may get you penalized or even blacklisted. What makes a good backlink? The answer is simple – does the backlink benefit your business? If it does, great, you should keep it. But if your business isn’t associated with the link it is coming from, you should get rid of it. Getting rid of bad backlinks can be a lengthy process but the rewards to your SEO make the effort worth it.
Start by reviewing all links to your site using Google Search Console. Once logged on, go to Search Console, select your property, expand Search Traffic and then click on Links To Your Site. Here, you will see a complete list of all inbound links to your site. Once you have identified low-quality backlinks, document details such as where the link is found, what anchor text was used, where the link leads etc., and contact that site’s webmaster with your request to remove the link. If you aren’t getting any response from them, be persistent and make at least 2 more efforts to contact the parties involved with your request. If you aren’t getting any response at all, then write down every step you have taken and use Google’s Disavow Tool.
Before I end this segment, I feel it is necessary to briefly discuss posting links to your website on social media. Yes, you should be sharing links to blog posts, promotion pages, landing pages and other kinds of content on social media, but like everything else, it needs some structure. Constantly promoting yourself will neither improve your engagement or your search engine page rankings. Be methodical and thoughtful when sharing links to your website on social media and make sure the link provides value to your social media audience.
Final Thoughts
Mistakes happen. Everyone makes mistakes. What is important about them though is learning about them and never repeating them. This will ensure that you are maximizing your SEO efforts. If you ended up with more questions than answers after reading this blog post, feel free to contact me with your questions, or leave a comment below. As a Google Certified professional, I would be happy to provide you a 30 minute free SEO audit and discuss your needs. Feel free to give us a call at 416-297-7343 or check out our Services page to see the many ways in which we can help your business.
