Are You Making These Critical SEO Mistakes

To market your business effectively, avoid the following critical SEO mistakes. If you are, you may find that your business is nearly invisible online, making it hard to survive, let alone grow your company. Unless you can survive without building an online presence, you need to create fresh, valuable content that’s optimized for SEO, build a community of engaged followers on social media, and maintain a website that looks professional regardless of the device used to view it. To avoid making critical SEO mistakes that might cost you your business, read on!

Avoid making these critical SEO mistakes

1. Not understanding SEO

The image below illustrates not only why you should care about SEO (it accounts for 53% of all traffic visiting your site, and even more if you run a B2B business) but also highlights some key factors to consider for improving your SEO, such as keywords and social signals.

The SEO process starts when a user enters a query. Increasingly, these queries come through voice assistants, like Alexa, which impacts your SEO strategy. Google, which accounts for 90% of all searches, uses the query to find the best content from the internet to deliver a rank-ordered list of links using a complex ranking algorithm. Since users click on a link in one of the top three positions over 68% of the time, landing one of those top spots generates a ton of traffic to your website.

2. Not defining who you are or who your target market is

You need to focus on who you are and who your target market is. You also need to ensure you’re aware of where you invest your money and why, so you get the biggest bang for your money. A critical SEO mistake is spending money on advertising, social media, or content marketing without knowing whether you’re reaching the individuals who generate revenue (or, in some cases, those generating the highest revenue), whether you’re achieving a good return on investment (ROI), or which activities yield the highest returns.

You may also find that you struggle to connect with your potential customers, which is the last thing you need. If you want to avoid wasting money and optimize returns, you need to build a solid digital marketing plan that integrates with the rest of your business plan. You need to lay out and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), so you always know what’s working and what’s not.

Utilizing tools like SEMrush or Google Analytics enables you to monitor performance and analyze data effectively. You can even parse your results to see how you’re doing with each of your target market segments. For instance, if you want to appeal to a specific demographic, you may want to narrow your focus; if you’re doing poorly with another group, you may want to adjust your strategy to increase your appeal. Ultimately, the option you choose will largely depend on who you are and who your target audience is, but keeping this in mind will help you down the line.

3. Duplicate content

Another critical SEO mistake is creating content using AI without human input, which often results in duplicate content. While Google states it doesn’t penalize content that’s AI-generated, it still comes under the classification of duplicate content unless you paraphrase that content. Another common reason for duplicate content occurs when you paste pages of the same content elsewhere. Experts recommend using less than 10% duplicate content from your site or other online sources.

While there’s no explicit penalty for duplicate content, like there is for other critical SEO mistakes, duplicate content still creates problems, including:

• Google won’t understand what page to rank for, which cannibalizes your keywords and reduces the SEO value of your content.
• Duplicate content provides limited value to users, leading to poor user experiences.

A good rule of thumb is to only use content written by people with expertise in the niche, and ensure you follow E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) guidelines, as these are the elements behind the SEO ranking algorithm. If you want to help market your brand online,  it’s a good idea to build every page with quality and care to provide value to your target market.

It will take more time, but Google will almost certainly recognize your efforts and reward you for them. You also need to learn what makes a good-quality page, so you can make sure that you are not missing out on rankings when you could be dominating the SERPs. If you feel as though your site needs a bit more than you can provide, remember, you can always look into technical SEO services as a way to build your authority and your presence online.

4. Only optimizing for a computer

If you make your website so it only looks good on a computer, you’re making another critical SEO mistake. Today, more users reach your website on a mobile device, so your content needs to look great regardless of screen size. We call this responsive design and it’s been a key ranking factor for several years. This includes mobile phones of various sizes, but it also includes tablets.

If your website doesn’t look good on mobile devices, not only do you receive a penalty from Google, but visitors will bounce as soon as they get to the site. A high bounce rate is another ranking factor, so you get a double penalty. You also lose the potential to make a sale or achieve other goals.

If possible, you should also look at your site on a range of devices before you publish it. This way, you can ensure the content you publish and your site, in general, look good regardless of screen size. You should also ensure visitors have a great user experience by using intuitive navigation, allowing sufficient distance between clickable elements to avoid unintentional clicks, and ensuring that images are high-quality so they look great on any screen.

5. Not doing keyword research

You probably create content that you feel provides value for your target market. Although there is nothing wrong with this, you may be wrong, or there are other topics your market might value more. Plus, regardless of topic, search engines use keywords embedded in your content (such as in headings, alt tags on images, and in your content) to match content to a user’s query based on perceived intent.

One way for you to help yourself is to use tools such as Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Explorer to find keywords reflecting a high search volume and low competition. Likely, you can’t find these Cinderella keywords, so you must make tradeoffs between volume and competition to find the best ones. Since you need fresh keywords for each post to avoid cannibalization, long-tailed keywords (actually phrases) help. Plus, since more folks use voice search, keywords are getting increasingly long and conversational.

6. Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a big deal. In the bad, old days, keyword stuffing was a common tactic. But, search engines got smart to the fact that this content provided limited value to users. Keyword stuffing is now one of the critical SEO mistakes you should avoid.

If you stuff your content with keywords, you’ll also find that your content ends up looking unnatural and unprofessional, which costs you in terms of trust with your target market. To avoid keyword stuffing, use keywords naturally within your content and don’t include them more than once every 200 words. Hence, a post this length means using my keywords less than 7 times . If you read your content and find that it doesn’t look natural, then you may need to fit that keyword into your content naturally elsewhere. If a keyword is irrelevant, but you believe that it has good ranking capabilities, then you should also avoid using it, because if you do, then you may find that you end up struggling more than you should be. You may also find that you end up sending the wrong signals to Google, which is the last thing you need.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, you may be making these critical SEO mistakes if you don’t understand the new search algorithms or have never paid attention to SEO when creating content. With that said, you do need to keep these mistakes in mind when crafting new content and systematically review your old content to improve the performance of posts and of the website as a whole. It will take time, but you’ll find that traffic will slowly improve.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.