Optimising your website for users and search engines are important if you want to run a successful business online. SEO helps you not only improve your brand’s visibility but it also helps you to increase your site’s organic traffic and ranking.
However, with a number of SEO techniques and best practices, there are high chances of you committing common SEO mistakes, especially, if you are a newbie in the online world. Hence, to ensure that this doesn’t happen and your site’s ranking & traffic don’t suffer from these silly mistakes, here is a list of Top 10 common SEO mistakes that you need to avoid along with actionable tips on how to fix these mistakes effectively.
So let’s get started!
#Top 10 Common SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Having a Non-mobile-friendly Website Design
The most common SEO mistake, not having a responsive design for your business website could kill your brand in the online world. Since most people, today, use smartphones and other devices to read, shop and surf online, by not making your site mobile-friendly you are losing out on potential customers.
Moreover, responsive websites are ranked higher in search results compared to traditional websites. Thus, in order to provide your audience with a superior browsing experience, irrespective of the device they are using, and to generate quality leads, ensure that you pick a web design that is responsive i.e. mobile-friendly.
Additionally, here are some useful tools that can help you check if your website is responsive or not and provide you with suggestions on how to optimize your site for mobile users.
Poor Page Speed and Load Times
A slow website hurts your website’s traffic and ranking. It is also one of the major reasons for a higher bounce rate and as such, if your site is taking more than 2 seconds to load than you need to find out what the issue is and fix it immediately.
Having a faster website will help you to improve user experience leading to increasing in traffic and click-through-rate. In addition, since website speed is a ranking factor, enhancing your site’s speed will help to boost your site’s ranking on SERPs.
Moreover, with tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix testing and measuring your site’s page speed and load time becomes easy. Plus, these tools also provide you with valuable insights that can help you rectify all issues swiftly.
Over-optimisation of Keywords a.k.a Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique that you need to avoid at all costs. Over-optimization of keywords in blog posts and web pages makes your content look unnatural, affecting readability which leads to the poor user experience. Plus, overuse of the same keywords makes your site look spammy, resulting in penalization by Google.
One technique to avoid this SEO mistake is to make use of Latent semantic indexing keywords (LSI Keywords) which are related keywords, search terms and phrases. This way you’ll be able to avoid overuse of keywords and at the same time improve the keyword density of your content. Best part, you can easily find relevant LSI keywords through the use of LSI keyword generator tool LSIGraph.
Remember, it is not the number of keywords that you use but the relevancy of the information provided that will help you to increase your organic traffic and ranking.
Not Fixing Broken Links on Your Site
Another major cause of frustration for users, too many broken links on your website has a negative impact not only on your site’s SEO but also your brand’s credibility. Dead links or 404 errors are frowned upon by Google as it halts search engine robots from accurately indexing your website. Thus, it is essential that you fix this SEO mistake post-haste if you want to improve your site’s ranking and increase your site’s conversion.
What’s more, you could easily identify and fix broken links through the use of the Google Chrome extension Check My Links or you could simply login to your Google Search Console account and fix all broken links that have been identified.
Creating Uninteresting and Low-Quality Content
Be it an SEO campaign or a Social Media campaign, creating engaging content is vital if you want to achieve your marketing and promotional goals. It is only through EPIC content that you would be able to garner organic traffic to your site as well as boost your brand’s visibility and as such, producing high-quality content is extremely crucial for the growth of your online business.
Furthermore, it is important that use a combination of different content formats like videos, infographics, Q&A, sliders etc, as this will help you improve engagement with your target audience, leading to higher sales and conversion.
Not Adding Alt Tags to Images
Alt tags are a snippet of text that tells search engines what an image is about. By not adding Alt tags to images you are losing potential traffic from Google Image Search. Hence, it is essential that you use Alt tags in order to optimize your images for search engines.
Alt tags also help improve the density of your target keywords. In addition, with the help of the Image Alt Test tool, you can easily analyze your web pages and add Alt tags to all required images. Thus, ensure that you don’t miss out on this vital on-page SEO factor.
Inconsistent Content Publishing
According to this data shared by Hubspot, companies that published 10+ blog posts per month get 3.5X more traffic compared to those who publish only 0 – 4 blog posts per month.
Moreover, since Google loves fresh content, a website that consistently publishes content has a better chance of being ranked at the top of the search engine result pages. Thus, in order to reap benefits like increase traffic, improve CTRs and a higher ranking it is important that you create high-quality content and publish it consistently.
Not Focussing on Local SEO
The main aim of local SEO is to optimize your site in such a way that it makes it easier for your target audience to find you online when they search for your business. Having a local business and not optimizing your site accordingly, could lead to the loss of potential customers. Therefore, if your business goal is to rank high on SERPs for local search terms then focussing on Local SEO is a must.
How to improve your site’s Local Search Ranking?
Here is a Local SEO guide that you can refer to which provides you with helpful tips to improve your local search ranking.
Neglecting Social Media Platforms
One of the most common SEO mistakes committed, especially, by new businesses and start-ups, no setting up an account for your brand on different social channels could hamper the growth of your online business.
Since most individuals, today, use varied social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc on a daily basis, by not having a social presence for your brand you are losing out on potential leads and limiting your brand from engaging with a global audience. Thus, if you want to increase your site’s visibility and if you want to increase your site’s traffic and search ranking then creating social profiles for your business is essential.
Not Investing Time in Blogger Outreach
To gain high-quality backlinks, to garner more exposure to your brand and to establish a connection with influential bloggers in your niche, investing time and effort in Blogger Outreach is important.
Blogger outreach is a cost-effective marketing strategy and can help you to get more referral traffic to your website. Plus, since influential bloggers in your niche are endorsing your brand, it helps build trust amongst customers. Therefore, if you don’t already have a Blogger Outreach strategy, then make sure that you have one now
in order to boost your SEO campaign.
Conclusion
Mistakes they say is the stepping stone to success. However, some mistakes, if not rectified, can do more harm than good, especially, in the online world. Thus, if you have implemented any of the above SEO mistakes then ensure that you remedy them right away. Plus, here is an in-depth guide to common SEO mistakes that you can refer to, in order to well-optimize your site for users and search engines.