February 4, 2019

SEO 101: Mistakes to avoid

February 4, 2019

SEO 101: Mistakes to avoid

SEO 101: Mistakes to avoid

1. Neglecting dated content

It’s all too easy to create content for your website and then abandon it for years without updating or refreshing since it was first published. So it’s important to focus on your analytics in order to determine the top and bottom performing pages of your site. This will allow you to conduct keyword research to unlock potential new opportunities or update existing content in order to improve your site’s ranking.Bang Tip: Create content that provides real value to your website visitors.

2. No call to action for your website visitors

The ultimate goal is to maintain a visitors’ stay on your site - they have chosen to visit for a reason, so make sure that you keep them there for as long as possible! Creating a clear call-to-action (CTA) that offers something of value to your visitors can prolong the time they spend browsing. A ‘buy’ button on a product page or a ‘sign up’ button for newsletters are good examples of a clear CTA. Bang Tip: Creating a CTA button at the top and bottom of your website will maximise opportunity and generate more conversions. No one wants to be scrolling up and down!

3. Disregarding the importance of site speed

This one is a no-brainer: faster sites have a better crawl rate and provide a better user experience. An easy way to improve your site speed (without doing too much work) is to optimise your images. When a website contains images large in size, this can create a lag time when loading your site content. It’s more important than ever before to ensure your site speed is as fast as possible. If your site is slow, users will lose interest very quickly and in turn, you could be penalised for it.Bang Tip: Google PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to test the speed of your site. It analyses and scores your site speed, allowing you to access helpful insights.

4. Lack of unique keyword targeting

Specific keyword targeting on a page-by-page basis is an element that’s consistently missed. Each page of your site should contain certain keywords relevant to the content, and should occur naturally in the URL and title of your page. If you want people to find your site, content cannot be ignored - simple content adjustments can have a big impact on ranking and traffic. Bang Tip: Wordstream have a compiled a list of free keyword tools to test which unique keywords can best serve your business. Test it out for yourself - you could be left with some really interesting insights!

5. Not optimising for mobile

Google introduced mobile-first indexing in 2018, which assesses the mobile version of your site and decides on how high it should rank. Even if the desktop version of your site is set up perfectly, the mobile version needs to be even more responsive. Bang Tip: Visit your site on your mobile phone - spend time browsing and test the responsiveness by clicking on every button, image and link. These should all be working as expected, but if they aren’t, take some time to figure out why and how to improve your site for mobile. This will improve the user experience and will encourage visitors to return.

6. Inattention to SEO trends

SEO is ever changing, and so should your SEO marketing strategy. You first need to understand your audience and user intent in order to best serve your customers. Does your audience prefer text, images, video or even audio? You may need to adjust your keyword research if your audience is not engaging with your content. Bang Tip: If your site enhances your audience’s journey, you’ll be rewarded by Google and your visitor will invest in you - listen to your audience and optimise your site to cater to their requirements in order to grow your business.

7. Neglecting broken links

Conducting a technical audit of your site will help to identify any broken links or redirect links that may occur on your site. If your site contains any of these links, you will need to remove the broken links and update the redirect links to connect directly to the correct target pages. This will ensure that search engines crawl your site more efficiently.Bang Tip: Broken links can hurt your SEO and chase your visitors away. SEOPressor Connect’s Link Manager can check the links on your website automatically and allow you to fix any and all broken links!

8. Treating SEO as a one-time task

Unfortunately, many businesses treat SEO as a ‘set and forget’ task. Businesses should constantly be evaluating the reach of their site to provide highly relevant content about their products and/or services. Set yourself a task to evaluate your strategy regularly, in order to remain relevant to your target market.Bang Tip: Leverage user feedback and reviews - online reviews have major implications through their ability to affect your rankings in local search engines and which search results are clicked on by a user.

Summary

SEO can be an overwhelming task to monitor and maintain, so use our tips to avoid making these mistakes in the future. Focus on updating your content, creating a call-to-action for your visitors, optimising the speed and usability of your site and constantly revising your SEO strategy.If you want to experience great results for your own website, get in touch with us today to see how we can implement a winning SEO strategy tailored to your business and its requirements.