Demands on SEO are growing every day, and so are the opportunities. Not only is the discipline expanding, so is the size of the market, which is predicted to reach $1.6 billion by 2027.
In recent years, SEO has evolved from being a siloed practice to a significant revenue channel that is being integrated into content marketing practices and overall digital strategies.
As you launch your site, you may decide that you’re going to stick with SEO for your primary traffic strategy, optimizing everything on your site in a bid to get search engines to give you a favourable ranking to generate traffic. So, you start by doing your keyword research and finding a few phrases that are bringing in massive amounts of traffic.
Now you expect your website to start climbing in search engine results. And it finally does, but not as fast as you’d wish it to. The next thing is you’ll start to ask yourself questions to try and figure out what’s going on, or what you may have done wrong.
Luckily, we have you covered. In this article, you will find ten mistakes that you are likely to make on a new website, together with their potential solution.
1. Looking Forward to a Quick Returns
It takes time for a new site to achieve the SEO results that they desire. This is mainly because site history is one of the website ranking factors considered by search engines, according to Yokellocal.
Internet marketers agree that SEO efforts can be measured between 6-9 months of a major push. To get your phone ringing while SEO ramps up, consider running Google PPC paid ads during the first several months that your website is online.
2. Not Knowing Your Audience
One of the fundamental base principles of SEO is to understand your target audience. That means knowing your consumers to the most minute and granular level. SEO is basically the voice of the customer.
Historical data is still a good method of giving SEO great insights into seasonal trends. However, marketers’ methods to understand their customers have to be more holistic than that.
To solve this issue, marketers should consider looking at the market from which the consumers mostly buy. Understanding the market is understanding the user.
3. Failure to Optimize for The Right Keywords
It’s easy to fall into the optimizing trap for global keywords when you only serve local customers or keywords that only bring in site visitors looking for free info and not looking to buy anything.
When it comes to SEO, it’s best to be as specific as possible. Focus on generic keywords to bring you a lot of traffic, if you’re successful. But how long will it take you, and how realistic is it? Sometimes, you’re better off going for more specific phrases, which usually lead to quicker rankings and more qualified traffic.
4. Having Duplicate Content
Large and small starting companies alike may go for duplicate content on their websites, and overlook it before posting. Duplicate content negatively affects SEO. It’s that plain and simple.
So what exactly is duplicate content? Duplicate content includes any form of matching content, pages and twin product listings across multiple pages. A study by Moz revealed that most people don’t create duplicate content intentionally and that up to 29% of the web is actually duplicate content!
If you often find this to be a problem as you start, there are a host of plagiarism tools online that you can use to check for duplicated content. Many are free and designed for revision and omission from a website.
5. Not Going For What Converts
Many beginners in the world of SEO tend to forget that it is not only about having free traffic on your site, but also converting site visitors.
It is easy to be distracted by watching phrases that send you traffic and forgetting about low traffic keywords. Often, these low-traffic keywords are in a better position to drive sales because they are more specific and appealing to the user.
To avoid making this mistake, you can employ the use of an analytics package to track conversion rates for your keyword phrases. You can then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results.
6. Failing to Optimize For Local Search
When you’re setting up a business that focuses on customers within a certain geographic region, it’s important to learn and understand everything that you can about local search. Most search engines, including Google, handle local search a bit differently than more global keywords.
You can start by including region-specific keywords in your page titles and meta descriptions. Then you might also want to include a physical address and a local phone number on your pages, such as in the header or footer so that you’ll show up in the local search results easier.
7. Slow Site Speed
When your site speed is low, it will deter people from trying to access content on your pages, and cost you hard-earned traffic. In the beginning, you have invested so much of your time and efforts to drive traffic from search engines but all that is a waste if the page takes too long to load.
Research by Backlinko suggested that the average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile. This shows that most sites have work to do when it comes to site speed. You can run your webpage through the Google PageSpeed Insights to check the performance of your page to help you understand more about your site’s speed.
The time between when users send a request to access your site, and when it is actually rendered is critical.
8. Poorly Written Content
At times, marketers lack time to create content for their sites, even when it’s new. The two popular ways of creating large amounts of content include hiring low paid article writers or using article spinners – software that takes one article and edits it using different to make it look like several unique articles.
This is however not a good idea, as search engines have become smarter with time. Even if not search engines, people can tell whether or not content is unique and valuable, and if it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and the audience won’t take action.
At clickslice, we have all the necessary SEO services to make your content unique and successful in Search Engine Result Pages.
9. Not Optimizing For Mobile
We are now living in a mobile-first world where most users rely on mobile devices rather than computers. A 2020 study by Perficient showed that 68.1% of all website visits came from mobile devices.
Having mobile-friendly websites will play to your advantage as you look to make your way up rankings. If you haven’t made use of this feature, then your site is also missing out on the most advanced types of design.
10. Not Taking Advantage of Great Link Designs
Hundreds of Cascading Style Sheets will link to your website simply based on having a great design. Additionally, you can look for blogs that do reviews of great website designs in particular industries and ask them to add your website to their list as well.
The high-quality links from these sites likely won’t convert, but they will have a positive impact on your domain authority.
