As a small business owner, it’s important for you to understand the competition and complexity of the online marketplace.
If you want to promote your business online to get more leads and sales, then there are several methods like SEO, PPC, influencer marketing and many more.
However, SEO is the most effective method to get free quality traffic to your site. In a recent study, it was found that the websites which are in the first position of the search results page received more than 30 percent click-through rate.
Nowadays, running a successful marketing campaign is much tougher than it seems. Most of the businesses are targeting the same set of audiences and keywords; therefore, it’s crucial for you to avoid any SEO mistakes to improve your site’s traffic and overall campaign ROI.
SEO is the success ladder where it becomes vital for a digital marketer to widen up their knowledge and enhance their skills to take their SEO game to the next level.
Here are the Top 8 SEO mistakes every business should avoid in 2019:
1. Not fixing broken links
Broken links are one of the critical factors which can affect your website’s search engine ranking negatively. Hence, ignoring broken links can prove fatal for your site’s growth.
First, let us understand what broken links are?
A broken link is simply a page that doesn’t exist. The page does not cause any problem but the links that are pointing on it.
The search engine bots don’t like to crawl the web pages that return a 404 error code because it wastes their time and resources.
A broken link occurs when a page is deleted which has been linked or when sometimes misspells the URL.
Your website can have internal as well as external broken links which you can analyze with the help of several broken links finding tools.
Once you have made a list of all the broken links, then remove them one by one because this type of fix can bring invisible results overnight.
2. Low-Quality Pages and Content
As a digital marketer, you would have heard the phrase “Content is king.”
Quality content is the one thing that differentiates your business for the rest of the crowd. It includes informational checklists, quizzes, interactive infographics and many more.
If you have a small website, then it is easy to manage the quality of your content. However, if your site contains thousands of web pages, then it requires a lot of effort in providing useful content to the users.
A website with value providing contents is more likely to have brand loyalty and affinity users.
If you try to index a website in Google which provides no value to the users, then you will get this message in your search console.
Google and other search engines might penalize your website without giving any warnings which will hurt the ranking of your keywords.
3. Using Wrong keywords
Keywords are a vital part of any SEO marketing campaign. They help the search engine bots to understand the contents and business goals.
Many small business owners fail to choose the keywords correctly, which results in ranking the website on the keywords which are not profitable.
It happens because most of them skip the vital part of their marketing strategy, i.e., keyword research.
Keyword research helps in finding what the users are searching on the web and how we can benefit from them.
For example, if you have an SEO services website like AmbulanceSEO, then you should target keywords related to SEO, content writing services, link building, local SEO, social media marketing, and others.
There are several keyword research tool available in the market which can be used in finding the relevant keywords for ranking your website like the Google keyword research tool and others.
Small businesses should target low competition and long tail keywords because they are easier to rank in the search engines.
4. Poor Social Media presence
If you want to promote new content, then social media is one of the best places where your website or content can get maximum exposure is less amount of time.
Many businesses make a huge mistake to not be active on social media platforms.
According to a survey, there are more than 1 billion active monthly users on Instagram, and more than 100 million photos and videos are uploaded on the platform every day.
Social media is not only good for getting free traffic, but it also helps in the ranking of your content in the search engines.
Most of the digital marketers will agree to the fact that social signals are an important factor that the search engines consider while ranking the keywords.
A website with high social engagement is more likely to rank higher in the search results page as compared to a site with less social signals.
The best part is you don’t have to be active on all the social platforms available. You can choose only the social media platform, which is best suited for your audience and share useful content.
5. Poor On-Page SEO
There are two types of SEO: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. A lot of marketers spend more time improving the off-page of a website, but they ignore the first.
When you create a web page, it’s essential to optimize the titles, meta descriptions and tags.
Here are some of the common on-page mistakes:
• Not having the keyword in the title and meta descriptions.
• Long titles and descriptions.
• Poor readability of the content.
Your title and description should be unique and engaging, which will make the users click on the link.
6. Not Promoting articles and blog posts
You should not think that your article or blog post should go viral because you have created a fantastic content. It will not happen until you have built a fan base of thousands of social media followers who will share our content.
Not promoting your blog post or content, in the beginning, is the most common mistake that every business make.
You should not feel shy about sharing your content because creating good content takes a lot of time and effort, and if no one sees, then your whole hard work will be wasted.
Here are some of the ways to promote your content online:
• Publish it on your social media business as well as a personal profile.
• Share it on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others.
• Send it to your email subscribers.
• Write guest posts on other websites and link back to your post.
7. Not having a content publishing plan
It’s not important to publish an article every day or once a week; however, what’s more, important is to post your content consistently.
Before creating any marketing plan, it’s crucial to decide when you want to publish your blog posts and stick to it, no matter what.
If you have decided to write only one new article every month, then be consistent and not skip publishing blog posts any month as it has an adverse effect on the website’s SEO.
Consistency is one of the factors which determines the ranking of a website in the search engines. So, every business should make a proper content publishing plan if they want to improve their ranking in the search engines.
8. Having a slow website
Speed is one of the primary factors of Google’s algorithm, which affects the website’s ranking position on the search results page.
The search engines want to make the web faster, and they are doing everything they can to achieve their goals.
A website which loads faster will not only have a lower bounce rate and high conversion rate but also improves the overall user experience.
In a recent study done by Google, it was found that more than 53 percent of the users are more likely to leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A faster website will get more page views and sales because it ranks higher in the search engines and gets more traffic.
Final Words
If you have an online business and you are unintentionally making any of the above-given mistakes, then it is recommended to take wise action and fix them immediately.
Acknowledge the SEO mistakes and implement the solutions to improve the overall search engine ranking of your website. Follow the good SEO practices and don’t use any unfair means to rank to your website as they can have a negative effect in the long run.