Common SEO Mistakes

SEO is an essential element of optimising your website and blog to put yourself at the forefront of your industry. When developing your content marketing strategy, it’s important to keep in mind that SEO methods are always changing as search engines evolve their techniques. With this in mind, businesses often fall behind especially when other areas of the business require their attention, SEO is often pushed to the side, despite the huge benefits to site traffic and conversion rates, that it can bring.

Here are a few common SEO mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

These play such an important part in your SEO strategy, yet many businesses fail to choose the right keywords or use them correctly. Use keywords that you think potential customers are most likely to search for, rather than what you would describe your services or products as. Understand that words might mean different things to different people, so try and be open without being too generic – otherwise, you will have many businesses to compete with.

Get Your Content Right

Once you have chosen your keywords, it’s imperative you don’t try and overload your online content with them. Search engines are starting to pick up on this and identify it as spam, which would hugely impact your SEO performance. Use keywords liberally and in the right places, and you’ll see big improvements. This also means that your content should be relevant, as search engines work by providing the right answers to a user’s question – if your content is all over the place just so you can fit in your keywords, it won’t get shown to users.

Don’t Skip The Meta!

A lot of businesses think their work is done when they include keywords in their content, but this means they are missing out on some key components of a successful SEO strategy. Title tags, meta descriptions and image tags are key ways to optimise your content. Search engines will crawl your site and use this information to index your pages in a similar way to keywords. This increases your chances of your content being seen so is a step that shouldn’t be missed.

Poor Loading Times Means a Poor Performance

While the content of your website is key, the way it is built can also hugely impact the way search engines rank your site. If a user searches for a query, clicks on your site and has to wait for ages on the page to load, they might click back and choose a different result. Search engines then take this into account for future rankings, assuming that the result wasn’t relevant to the user’s query. You can improve your load times by using caching programmes or compressing the size of your image files. It’s also imperative the site is built well, to begin with and is made fully responsive, especially as search engines now can pick up on this. As most users will search via mobile, a site not optimised for this will be less likely to be shown to the user.

Local Searches Verify Your Business

Many businesses forget about the importance of a local search, but it can be highly beneficial to increase your ranking. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, or even an office, it’s important you ensure your NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) are correct on local directories that are relevant to your industry. This will ensure that when a query is inputted in a local search, such as ‘digital agency Birmingham’,  your business is not only more likely to be seen, but will also verify that you are established, increasing your consumer’s trust in you.

High Expectations

We often see businesses expecting results overnight when it comes to their SEO performance, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It’s important not to expect too much too soon, but to also keep in mind that consistency and dedication is required to ensure you see results. Continually posting new content and adapting your SEO strategy to keep up with search engine developments is key to seeing improvements.

It can be useful to hire an external creative agency to manage your SEO content and strategy so that you can focus on other areas of the business. For more information on how we can help your business, contact us.