Many businesses understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), which can help more people find your business, its products, and services so you can capture more leads and increase sales. However, whether you’re new to SEO or have been doing SEO on your website for years, you still might be making mistakes that can harm your business. Even the smallest SEO mistake can cause rankings to drop, which means less traffic and even fewer sales.
Unfortunately, it can take months for you to see the fallout of these errors to make them discoverable. Here’s everything you don’t know about SEO that could harm your business.
You Should Perform Regular Audits
SEO requires constant monitoring, but it can be easy to forget to pay attention to something without making a plan to perform audits. SEO audits can uncover problems in your SEO strategy, such as indexing issues, broken links, and duplicate content. Unfortunately, problems are bound to show up now and then, even if you’re careful. However, you can discover issues before they impact your rankings with regular audits.
Some webmasters do an audit once a year, but it can leave errors on your site that cause rankings to drop and traffic to decrease. Instead, aim to do an audit at least once a quarter to ensure your website is performing well and there are no technical SEO errors.
If your website has never undergone an audit, then now is the time for a complete audit. After the initial dive into your SEO, you won’t have to do audits as often. However, the larger your website, the more often you should audit it.
Of course, even when you’re not auditing your site, you should be checking on your rankings. There are many SEO webmasters available to perform audits at set intervals for you and catch technical issues that you can quickly fix.
If you’re using WordPress, you can easily re-optimize old content using a plug-in such as Yoast to ensure everything that shows up on your audit can easily be fixed.
Social Media Matters
While your post on Facebook likely won’t show up in search results, having more shares on a post can help it rank higher in search engine results pages. Your business should be active on social media, including doing influencer marketing because it signals to Google and other search engines that your company is legit and well-known.
Although SEO is more about getting visitors to your website than getting conversions, you should never ignore what matters to your business most. Conversions are your website’s ultimate goal, so if you’re getting tons of traffic and no conversions, something is wrong.
Focusing only on rankings and not checking on your conversion data means you might be wasting resources on getting keywords to rank that are not as effective for your website. Instead, you might even be bringing the wrong types of visitors to your site.
You can use online tools like Google Analytics to determine which pages have the highest conversion rates. Checking on your conversions helps you manage your SEO strategies, allowing you to uncover new opportunities for your website.
Don’t Forget About Search Intent
The keywords you choose for your website are what will bring quality traffic to your website. However, SEO isn’t all about keywords; it’s about how those keywords relate to search intent. If you rank for a keyword where the search intent is educational rather than transactional, then you might be missing out on an opportunity for more conversions.
Gone are the days when you could look at a list of keywords and choose the ones with the highest volume. Instead, you need to figure out the search intent of people using those keywords.
Search engines will display results based on what they believe a user is searching for and what their intent is. If your keywords don’t align with that intent, you won’t rank. You may remember that you could search for a term just a few years ago and get many different results for many different purposes. Now, Google and other search engines understand your intent based on the keywords you use.
Instead of choosing keywords based on volume alone, you should do a Google search and see the type of content that’s ranking. If that type of content isn’t what your page is about, then you’ll need to pick a new keyword.
Creating Poor Content
Bad content is a reason why many websites fail. If your website doesn’t provide useful and valuable content to users, they’ll quickly leave your site and nothing will convert in your favor. Not only that, but search engines want to provide users with the highest quality experience, which means providing them with high quality and engaging content.
One common mistake is when e-commerce sites post content within their blog, but it provides no value for their audience. Instead of informing their audience or providing important insights, the content is virtually useless.
Instead, consider the results already ranking so you can make your content better. Using data, visuals, and answering common questions can help your content rank better.
Old Backlink Strategies
There have been many popular backlinking strategies over the years, but some are worse than others. For example, obtaining links through link farms or paid content is detrimental. Instead, you should aim for natural links. Google has a clear view on link schemes, so your link strategy mustn’t appear spammy.
As search engines continue to get smarter every year, they’ll continue to penalize sites with unnatural links. Remember, there’s no reason you can’t do outreach to build links, but the quality of your website content might also be enough to help you generate backlinks.
Site Speed is Crucial
Slow site speed can impact your rankings and conversions. After all, nobody wants to wait around for a website to load when another website loads faster. Again, search engines want to provide their users with the best experiences, which means sending them to sites that quickly loads.
Unfortunately, many webmasters destroy their website’s load times with uncompressed images and unnecessary code, which means a beautiful site is taking too long to load, and nobody is waiting around to see it.
Local SEO
All businesses need an SEO strategy, but many small businesses don’t realize they also need a local SEO strategy. Search queries are treated differently based on the keywords and the user’s location. A search query that doesn’t have a location attached can be prioritized in search results based on the location of the user. For example, when you search for a restaurant online, you’ll only see local results. You will never see a restaurant located in another state.
Even national companies can dedicate pages to different locations they service. Therefore, not optimizing location pages can allow your competitors to get the traffic you deserve, which means you’ve missed out on a sale.
SEO Mistakes
SEO is constantly evolving and changing, so it’s a continuous process. You can’t simply optimize a web page once and not return to it. You should revisit your rankings and web pages every few months to ensure they are ranking and you’re not losing any traffic.
