Search engine optimization is one of the most vital aspects every online marketer should include in their digital marketing strategies. It increases the visibility of your web content in the search engine results pages, thereby making it easy for your target audience to find you quickly.
As such, an excellent SEO strategy can go a long way toward increasing your lead generation, conversion ratesand ultimately boosting your business revenues.
But it takes much energy and resources to feature on the top pages. Most search engines do not tolerate bad SEO practices, which, in a technical term, are referred to as black hat SEO.
Errors made in your SEO strategy could be so costly. Your site might be penalized and relegated to the last pages. And this could potentially kill your business. This is the last thing you want to audit for your business.
If your website has not been ranking like you expect it to, there are high chances you have made SEO mistakes in your digital marketing strategy. You must trace these mistakes and fix them to restore your supremacy in search engines. In this article, we will look at some of the top SEO mistakes you might be making and how to resolve them.
Mistake 1: Keyword Stuffing
Search engines use keywords to display results as per the users’ searches. Most businesses are often tempted to use as many keywords as possible with the intention of boosting their searches.
But as it occurs, keyword stuffing will only do you more harm than good. It won’t just give you the results you so much desire. The reason is that search engines such as Google will view high keyword density as a sign of poorly-written content.
Such content will not be ranked high on the search engine results pages. Additionally, content with stuffed keywords only leads to poor customer experience, and this can potentially harm your rankings.
How to Avoid this Problem
It is vital to be extra-keen when dealing with the keyword issue. First, you must leverage Google’s Keyword Research Tool to search for the words that are relevant to your content or business.
It would not help you to have an endless list of invaluable keywords. Instead, focusing on a few phrases that direct visitors to your website could help you immensely.
Always ensure that you apply the phrases appropriately and within context. Having a natural flow of keywords within your content will be of great essence. More importantly, remember to add keywords in your meta tags, descriptions, and page URLs.
Mistake 2: Using A Weak URL Structure
Most SEO experts have reiterated the issue of URLs. However, most people seem to ignore this critical SEO feature. The idea here is simple; if you are yet to make the HTTP to HTTPS migration, you are treading towardsthe bottom in the search engines.
Google uses the HTTP/HTTPS factor to rank websites. An HTTP website will rank lower than HTTPS websites. You can experiment yourself, search anything in Google and check the top results. You will notice that HTTPS websites are dominating.
The idea behind HTTPS as a ranking factor was initiated by Google to establish internet security. HTTPS transactions are encrypted, and therefore, they are outside the hackers’ reach.
You are not only making an SEO mistake but also compromising the safety of your website and your users by failing to use HTTPS.
How to Avoid this Problem
There is only one remedy to this problem: Buying and installing an SSL certificate on your website. An SSL certificate is the tool that will initiate the HTTPS protocol on your site.
However, most webmasters have raised an issue about the certificates being expensive. That is actually not the case. There are lots of cheap SSL certificate options on the market.
Take an example of few popular yet inexpensive certificateslikesRapidSSL certificate, GeoTrust, QuickSSL, Premiuim SSL, Thawte wildcard SSL certificate. So, to avoid ranking so low in the search engines, you better get an SSL certificate today.
Mistake 3: Poor Link Building
Link building is another excellent SEO strategy because it helps to harness referrals and establish the authority of your website. Backlinks tell search engines that your websites contain valuable content or material, and search engines are more likely to reward your website with high rankings.
However, there is a need to proceed with great caution and avoid backlink-related mistakes that could cost your SEO strategy.
For instance, some people have made the mistake of buying links. However, although this might seem like a quick and harmless trick to get more links, it is not recommended.
Search engines can detect unnatural link building and penalize you if they realize such schemes. Moreover, link exchanges with other sites could also jeopardize your SEO. Search engines can detect such tricks, which can lead to Google penalties.
How To Avoid This Problem
Backlinks are indeed hard to come by, especially if you are new in the industry and yet to establish a reputation. But one best bet to resolve your backlink hitch is using social media platforms.
Search engines view these platforms as reputable and won’t penalize you for using them. You can leverage the power of social media to drive more customers to your website. Moreover, when done rightly, internal links could give you a huge SEO boost.
Mistake 4: Duplicate Content
In search engine optimization, perfect content creation is vital. But most businesses usually fail to create compelling, informative, fresh, and engaging content and opt to use duplicate content.
Spinning content or copying texts from other websites will never do any favors to your company. First, Google will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, which means that duplicate content makes your chances of appearing top of search engines dwindle.
Content in this perspective may be written content, images, videos, and graphics.
Secondly, there are copyrights that govern online content. Duplicating online content could only get you to the wrong end of the law, which might bring reputational damages and cause more harm than good.
Search engines will punish content duplication by lowering the website’s ranks in the search engine results pages.
How To Deal With This Problem
If your website has compelling content, it will attract visitors, and other sites will want to link to your content. Your website will establish itself as an authority, and search engines will reward such a website with high rankings.
This is why you need to invest enough in creating valuable, accurate, precise, and information-rich content that teaches, informs, enlightens, and keeps your visitors coming for more.
The trick is first to research the needs and expectations of your target audience and create content that meets these needs. You can use analytics to determine the relevance of your content. If you are too busy to create content for your website, I suggest you hire a freelancer to do the task for you.
Mistake 5: Failing to Optimise Content For Mobile
Mobile phone usage has been increasing exponentially, with the numbers projected to hit 7.49 billion by 2025.
As mobile usage increases, so does the traffic originating from mobile devices. It means that if you are yet to optimize your website for mobile, you are missing out on a lot of traffic.
But that is not the only consequence you face for failing to optimize your site for mobile. Since 2018, Google has been favoring websites that are optimized for mobile.
It means that if your website performs poorly on mobile devices, you can as well forget about your visibility in the search engines.
How to Deal With This Problem
You must always take care of user experience when designing your website. And one of the perfect ways of doing that is by making your website optimized for mobile.
First, you can copy and paste your website’s link to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to determine if your website is well optimized for mobile. If not, you should consider hiring a professional designer to do the task for you.
Conclusion:
We understand how hard Search engine optimization could be. It encompasses several elements, and ensuring that all these elements are appropriately handled might be a problem, which is why most people end up making the SEO mistakes discussed above.
The article has explained these mistakes and how best to avoid them. Avoiding these mistakes could potentially boost your ranks and take you top of competitors in the search engine results pages.