Biggest SEO Mistakes To Avoid

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Content marketers have to put in days, even weeks, of hard work and time to prepare content. However, it can be disheartening for a content marketer if the content doesn’t rank in the search engine. If it has happened to you, you understand that it’s not a very good feeling, to say the least. Marketers create content to reach their target audiences and anyone else searching for it.

Many marketers and business owners fail to get results from their search engine optimization efforts because of falling prey to common SEO mistakes. SEO is one of those strategies that you can implement in a few weeks, but it takes time to master. The first five organic results account for 71% of all clicks on searc engines. If you want to compete for high-traffic words and phrases, there are a few mistakes that you must avoid so that you can get that first-page ranking.

Here are the most common SEO mistakes you need to avoid to keep your digital marketing strategy intact.

Failure To Set Goals

It is no surprise that you need clear goals to succeed with SEO. Many business owners and marketers ignore this and run SEO campaigns without goals. They believe that SEO will increase their traffic, and subsequently their sales. The problem is, things are not always quite that simple.

For your SEO efforts to pay off, you need to understand what you want to achieve. Is it better quality traffic, more organic leads, or more sales you’re trying to get? Failure to set your priorities straight from the beginning is like starting a journey without knowing your destination. 

For example, you may be attracting thousands of monthly organic users to your website, but only 1% of them end up buying from you. In this case, you’re either driving the wrong traffic to your website, or your website is not effective enough in converting visitors into customers. Without clear goals, you’ll end up with a bunch of vanity metrics and not much else.

Not Using Analytics

SEO isn’t only about massive amounts of free traffic. It’s also about converting the traffic. You may easily get caught up watching which phrases are sending you the most traffic, and then get bummed when you can’t rank for those super-competitive, high-traffic keywords. But traffic isn’t all that matters. Sometimes, lower-traffic phrases will convert better because they’re more specific, and getting first page rankings for several of them can drive sales remarkably.

The only way to find out if your efforts are paying off is to track it. Use an analytics package to set up conversion tracking for your keyword phrases, and then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results. Google Analytics is used by 56.8% of all websites to track their progress and know what is holding them back. Knowing will help you better optimize your site as a whole and know which efforts are worth focusing on and which ones you should let go of.

Optimizing For The Wrong Keywords

Selecting and using the wrong keywords is one of the most common mistakes when creating content. For example, it’s easy to fall into the trap of optimizing for global keywords when you only offer services to local customers.

As you create content, it’s best to be as specific as possible. Sometimes you’re better off going for more specific phrases, which lead to quicker rankings and more qualified traffic. Other keywords to avoid are those that only bring in visitors looking for free information, not prospective customers interested in buying something.

Beginners tend to make the mistake of using broad keywords that have lots of competition, maybe with several SEO experts working full-time to defend the first-page ranking. 71% of marketers say using strategic and specific keywords was their number one strategy for SEO. Start with keywords that would probably start producing results immediately. You could then optimize for more competitive keywords as your website grows and gains authority.

Writing Poor Content

People online are searching for informative and quality content that matches their queries. But still, we come across websites that write very poorly written content for the readers. Irrelevant content with ordinary writings standards only harms your rankings.

The two most popular ways of creating a large quantity of content are hiring low paid article writers and using article spinners, software that takes one article and re-words it to make it look like several unique articles to search engines. The content might be well optimized, but you also need to consider the impression it’ll give visitors. Search engines, and more importantly, people can tell whether or not content is unique. If it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and you’ll have a much harder time regaining it.

Quality content has consistently been a factor toward gaining traffic and ranking for your site. Search engines have their users’ best interests at heart, so if your content is below standards or irrelevant, it simply won’t rank.

Poor Use Of Links

To get the best out of SEO, it is essential to include quality external links in the content. Always make sure your external links are from a relevant, high-ranked website with a higher Domain Authority. While there are many easy ways to get a high volume of links, you should emphasise quality.

One link from a popular blog might do more for your search engine rankings than thousands of low-quality directory links. Yes, they’re harder to get, but that’s also why search engines place such trust in them. Link building is one of the two most important signals that Google uses to rank your website for search. They are a more reliable measure of the quality of your website.

Using a call to action, like ‘click here, as your link costs you the opportunity of tailoring your anchor text. However, avoid using similar anchor texts every time you link to a page. It looks funny to visitors and can hurt your search engine rankings. Mix it up and use variations of the phrase. It will look more natural to site visitors and search engines. 

At Clickslice, we offer extensive link building services to help you grow your traffic and rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages.

Article by:

Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.

He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.