Google has a reward-and-punish system when it comes to ranking pages. As much as it loves good content and relevant pages for searched keywords, Google’s algorithm is equally dedicated to derank or sometimes deindex sites with poor SEO.
While you want to implement all the best SEO practices you also want to sidestep the bad ones that can hurt your traffic. The following are 6 biggest SEO mistakes that are keeping your business from reaching its full potential.
Not Getting Help From a Reputed SEO Company
Perhaps nothing else sums up the importance of hiring a good SEO company than the popular saying, “a bad friend is worse than an enemy.” You are much better off not hiring an SEO company than hiring one that implements obsolete tactics or adopts risky ways to get you traffic.
There are plenty of “SEO firms” who are out there for quick projects. Meaning they neither have the expertise nor the intention to make any long term positive changes for their clients. They keep on implementing cookie-cutter SEO campaigns for all their clients without really understanding the goals and industry requirements. A lot of these companies also measure their success by metrics and parameters that make no difference to the bottomline of the businesses they are serving.
Long story short, stay clear of shady SEO firms and know how to identify reliable SEO companies. Client reviews on independent listings sites are a good place to start.
Adding Dates to URLs
The problem with having URLs with dates on them is that Google believes that the content is only relevant for that particular year.
This means the content created loses its value over the years. Unless you keep on changing the date and keep on updating the content, which is impractical.
A lot of the times the dates in the URLs are auto generated by WordPress and other CMS platforms. You need to make sure to remove them when uploading a new post.
Deprioritizing User Experience
It’s not just targeting the right keywords and implementing a killer PPC strategy to draw in traffic. It’s also about ensuring that people who do end up in your site stay there and keep coming back.
That’s where user experience comes in and Google is prioritizing that over other parameters when ranking sites.
If people visit your site and then instantly hit the back button to go back to the search page, Google considers the content of that page to be irrelevant. If it happens time and time again then Google may derank the page for the searched phrase.
There is no quick fix to the user experience issue. Some sites have huge chunks of text written in small fonts and a boring language that causes users to bounce. While others may have an outdated design that’s failing to resonate with the audience.
Not Focusing Enough on Creating Interesting Content
Forget keywords, forget the nitty gritties of SEO and digital marketing. Are your blog posts interesting? Do they really solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before? Is the content written in a way so that it appeals to all and in a font size that’s comfortable to read?
All of these factors play a critical role in ensuring your blog posts get enough traffic and social shares. Apart from creating interesting textual content, try and add custom vector designs to convey what you are trying to say visually. Add infographics or videos whenever there is an opportunity without making it seem forced. Really go in-depth and create content that’s interesting to the influencers in your business.
Exclusively Targeting Highly Competitive Keywords
Targeting highly-competitive keywords can be a waste of resources, especially if your business site is not an authority site. It has little hopes of outranking the established sites that have tons of content on that search term.
A better approach is to make a list of low-competition keywords and get a flow of traffic for those search terms. Once your site gets some momentum, start targeting mid to high competition keywords to witness a boost in traffic.
Forgetting Those Long-Tail Keywords
While it’s important to shoot for those high-volume primary keywords that are relevant for your business, it’s also a good idea to go for the long-tail keywords.
Long-tails are easier to rank for as they are usually less competitive. Long-tail keyword variations can also be used to target people who are searching for specific services and products and are much more likely to convert.
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