Every website needs SEO. Thinking of progressing in your business using an unoptimized website is a big mistake. And many businesses do take it seriously. However, to err is human. And here are some mistakes you could have been making. This will help you get some unique insights about how you can un-ruin your chances of growing. Let’s learn some SEO mistakes to avoid.
Slow Page Speed
Say, you have a hotel website with an online booking tool pinned to it. The user has taken reviews of your hotel all over the web and is finally convinced to book.
The worst things that can happen now is that after clicking on the ‘Buy Now’ button, the next page takes forever to load. Do you think this will give off a good impression of your brand to the viewer? Heck, it might as well deter the user from making the booking.
Better user experience brings more views. More views bring more reviews. And all that improves your page rank. Hence, making a speedy website is imperative for your SEO.
Bad Landing Page Design
Landing page is not just about a few pointers thrown around along with an email form. Irrelevant information in the description of your service, too long of a description, lack of symmetry in the graphics of the page and suchlike are all blunders of designing a landing page.
Lack of Mobile-Optimization
In Google’s algorithm update of 2015, it included mobile-compatibility to the criteria for deciding the rank of a web page. This makes it a non-negotiable responsibility for you to either have a separate mobile website, or a responsive version of your current website for mobile phones. Sure, setting it up and maintaining it will cost money, but it will one of the most worthwhile investments you can make for your business.
Also, most people carry out most of their tasks on mobile phones these days. Everything from maintaining notes to booking flights is being taken care of by that little toy that needs nothing more than a solid internet connection to help you execute most of your daily online tasks whenever, and from wherever you want.
Too many distractions
It is understandable that you care about your website visitors. This is why you want to include as much information as possible on your website’s home page itself.
However, if you inundate your homepage with tons of product descriptions, features and images in slideshows, that will make a perfect recipe for a distracted viewer. In this age of rampant attention deficit among the youth, making a distractive website is the last thing you want to do.
If you are describing your product on the home page, keep in mind that it is an ‘introduction’. The entire description must not make it’s way to the home page. And this was just one example. There is usually too much clutter on the websites that the targeted user has nothing to do with. Why keep it there when it is irrelevant?
Follow the simple rule. Use more images, and as less words. Show more, tell less.
Lack of a Site-Map
If you do not have a well planned site-map, organising, maintaining and updating your website will be a nightmare. Make a site-map, and make it public for the viewers to easily navigate through it. This also adds up to your SEO score because Google loves organisation of digital content.
Lack of Browser-Compatibility
Different browsers have different requirements. While Google Chrome may be one of the most popularly used web browsers, not everyone will be using it. There’s mozilla, opera, safari and many more.
Now, say, you have optimized your page for some browsers, while the other widely used ones were left out, that is going to dissatisfy the users of that particular segment and hence, bring your website ranking down.
Lack of Local Optimization
Whenever somebody types in your website name in a search engine, what do they see? Everything that anybody else does? Despite your business being located right next to their street?
It is important to customize your website for your local visitors. You can add call to action buttons such as ‘book a table now’, which will appear in the search results as soon as a local user searches your website’s name in a search engine. This will largely benefit you, as long as yours is a business that thrives on local customers, which is the case with all businesses barring outsourced project-oriented ones.
Lack of Social Media Activity
Posting product images once in a while is the perfect pasth to fading into oblivion on social media. You must constantly make your audience realize that you ‘exist’. You must ask them frequent questions, engage with them in comments, answer their queries promptly and manage all this with consummate consistency.
Lack of CTA clarity
The number of converts on your website largely depend on the number of clicks on your CTA button (Call to action). It is basically an invitation to the viewer to do something by clicking on a button.
To exemplify, if yours is a hotel, “Book now” would be one of your CTAs on your landing pages.
Many websites make the mistake of overlooking the importance of CTA prominence. Either it is too small to make the viewer notice it, it is wordy, or it is ambiguous. Make sure you make it as prominently visible on your website. This is an important part of ux (user experience), and Google likes it.
Lack of Updation of Old Content
Everything is uncertain. The environment is dynamic. And change is inevitable.
It is hence, imperative for you to update your website regularly. This specifically applies to websites with elaborate blogs that discuss political, social, economic, legal and technical issues. These topics are the most susceptible ones to change. Hence, they require constant updation.
Updated content is helpful (obviously). This is why it helps you remain in the Google algorithm’s good books.
Lack of value-driven blogs
Value-driven blogs are those that highlight the benefits of the product being advertised or promoted.
Say, you’re promoting a type of tea by a brand. And you go on raving about the history of its evolution. Or, being too specific about the machine that processed the tea leaves.
It is understandable that your brand spent big money on that machine. But, sorry to burst your bubble. Nobody cares about the machine that processed your tea. Everybody is interested in the benefits of your product.
Only when you familiarise your audience with the benefits of the product, the audience will see any value in it. Otherwise, your blogs will not be helpful to them.
Ineffective Outreach Strategy
This mostly stems from ineffective market targeting. Who is your target audience if you own a hotel? Millennials? Or corporate guests?
The answers to these questions depend a lot on the analysis you have done of your business environment, your strengths and weaknesses.
Are you putting the wrong ads up for paid promotion on Facebook? Are you ignoring the stages of customer awareness in your business targeting process? Or, are you only providing selective information which serves only one of your consumer segments?
All of these mistakes kill your potential to derive convertible leads by way of your website content. Hence, develop a strategy focusing on all the segments critical to your business and implement it accordingly, for maximum outreach.
Inconsistent content publishing
So, you want lots of content posted on your website. But you do it in small bursts because publishing articles along with images seems like another time consuming ordeal to you. You happen to post 5 articles in one week, following which, you post none.
While you may be satisfied with this approach, it is perilous and detrimental to your SEO. One of the critical success factors in deciding the pagerank of your website is consistency of your website. If you don’t believe this, take a test. Post one blog everyday for a week, and you will notice the pagerank of your website starting to improve.
Now, the problem that many businesses face is that making so much content becomes a time consuming process. But fret not! ‘Consistency’, remember? Post thrice a week, but make it a routine practice. Do it, and you shall certainly benefit from it.
Lack of effective promotion
Are your product descriptions wordy? Are you writing blogs only targeted at one of the many customer segments of your business? Or, are you lacking in the distribution part of the content?
If you can relate to any of the aforementioned scenarios, you are making costly mistakes that can take your SEO for a ride. A downward ride. Sure, you are supposed to make great content. But all
Lack of Alt Tags in Images
Lack of Alt tags in your images makes it difficult for users to find you. Alt tags give you an opportunity to put another keyword that is relevant to your content, other than the one that your image has been titled by.
Uninteresting Headlines
Good headlines convert deals. In Google’s algorithm update of 2015, it included mobile-compatibility to the criteria for deciding the rank of a web page. This makes it a non-negotiable responsibility for you to either have a separate mobile website, or a responsive version of your current website for mobile phones. Sure, setting it up and maintaining it will cost money, but it will one of the most worthwhile investments you can make for your business.
Lack of Engaging content elements
Thinking of running a business with a website that lacks engaging content is delusional. You must add content and data types all over your website. Graphs, gifs, videos, small clips, infographics, mind-maps, you name it! You can add much more than blobs of paragraphs all over your write-ups. That creates variety and hence, doesn’t bore the viewer. Engaging content gets hits, and improves your SEO score.
Using Irrelevant and Boring Images
Images are there for a purpose. They are there to engage the viewer. Adding irrelevant images on a blog is like using an orange juice video to advertise a fitness program. How are the two related?
Another example of this can be when you put images of people that look nothing like your target audience. Why show people from India in your images when your targeted market is Canada? Pretty weird, right? Hence, using relevant and interesting images is paramount. It does consume some time. But then, it is a worthwhile investment of effort.
Unoptimized images for social media distribution
Thou shall always optimize. Unoptimized images are those that lack relevant descriptions on them. Ideally you should put the focus keyword in the Image description itself. This is a great way to not come off as a ‘keyword stuffer’. You are anyway supposed to mention your keyword 2 to 4 times in write-up. Why forcibly stuff your content with it when you can make the same look natural with an image?
Key-word Stuffing
While there may have been a time when shoving keyword in each of your blog’s paras was effective in lifting your page rank, it doesn’t work anymore. It is a big charisma-killer. And come on, who wants to read a blog with no charisma?
Engaging content, written with charisma and conviction is the hallmark of quality. This is what gets your viewers get addicted to your blogs and articles. But just for some SEO brownie points, you tend to repeat your focus keyword way too much in a single blog. And Google hates it? You don’t want to disappoint the search engine on which your website success depends, do you?
Lack of proper Interlinking
Proper interlinking and lots of backlinks are paramount for a successful website. You Must add links to subsequent pages of your website on the succeeding and preceding pages of your website. This is very user friendly and improves the ux, which is an important component of Google’s Algorithm that decides your SEO score.
Not replacing Broken Links
This is a common problem with the internet. Let’s accept it. Links get corrupted over time. And we can’t help it. What we can do, is repairing them with regular checks on our blogs every once in awhile. This makes both Google and your viewers happy. The link you posted was there to help your visitors, wasn’t it?
Bad keyword research
What is the use of putting a keyword into your tags that isn’t being searched at all? You must employ tools like buzzsumo.com and other similar ones to be able to figure out the most searched keywords related to your content at the time of publishing it. This will make an immense difference to your SEO sore and makes it a breeze for your website to gain substantial traffic in less time. Call it a shortcut to quick traffic increase.
Lack of Analysis
There’s a reason Google has been generous enough to release its tool Google Analytics, for free. You are describing your product on the home page, keep in mind that it is an ‘introduction’. The entire description must not make it’s way to the home page. And this was just one example. There is usually too much clutter on the websites that the targeted user has nothing to do with. Why keep it there when it is irrelevant?
No links to good websites
Effective linking is what adds a lot of quality to your articles. It is also a good trick to let Google know that your content is relevant enough to merit the name of another good website, which has a lot of followers and traffic.
What is amazing about this approach is that you improve your SEO score without employing any of the nifty, blackhat SEO techniques. Hence, whenever you feel the need to mention a piece of content from another good website, do that. Also, for obvious reasons, it is a good practice to include the websites that are not your direct competitors.
We hope that our guide to these common SEO mistakes was helpful to you. Let us know if we missed out on something in the comments below. Let’s start a discussion!