Top 10 Biggest SEO Mistakes
There are many mistakes businesses can make regarding seo when they don’t hire a seo company and we’ll be discussing the top 10 mistakes they can often make.
When you’re running a company, it’s vital to have SEO in some way. SEO will help grow your business substantially, but it can be easy to make simple mistakes that can hurt your business. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization (Frequently Asked Questions About SEO), if used the right way, you can attract a lot of customers to your business. On the other hand, if these common mistakes are made, you could be forgotten in a sea of competitors. Many of these mistakes are things that are overlooked, forgotten, and unheard of, but can be the reason your business is slow. So, what are the biggest mistakes most businesses make with SEO?
1. Not Targeting the Right Customers
When you put in keywords for your company, you’ll want to be specific about who you’re trying to attract. Keywords are what you’re assuming people will search for and many companies make the mistake of making their keywords too broad (Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). For example, if a medical clinic wanted to enter keywords, they would attract more customers by putting an emergency room/hospital/clinic near me than just assuming people will look up medical clinics. By putting a more specific response, people looking for the clinic in an emergency will see it quicker and are more likely to choose them. So when adding keywords, be wary of what customers you’re trying to target. If you’re not directing certain keywords toward a certain group of people, it’ll be harder to attract customers (How to get traffic).
2. Little to No Keyword Research
When you’re not targeting a certain group of people with your keywords, you can often find little results. This is even more true if you haven’t done any research on what keywords you should use. Alexander Kesler once said, “While many marketers think they know their audience, they often fall into the trap of not understanding how consumers behave in their market and then at a granular level.” When adding keywords, businesses can often forget what kind of service or product consumers are searching for. That’s why research is so important because it gives you an idea of what keywords you should be adding and what your consumers are looking for.
3. Using Redundant Keywords
If you use the same keywords repeatedly, it can cause you more problems than not doing research on and applying certain keywords. If you overuse certain keywords it can be difficult for the consumer to read and understand what you’re saying, causing them to leave more quickly. Also, if you add too many keywords, your page can be marked as spam (Spamdexing). For example, “Our restaurant is better than other restaurants. We have better food than the food at the other restaurants. So call our restaurant today!” This can be redundant and unappealing to most consumers. It can also lower your rating within Google and make your company more difficult to find as well as cause Google to penalize or remove your website from the index (Spam policies for Google web search). If you’re careful to not overuse certain keywords it’ll help you attract more customers and rate higher on google.
4. Creating Common or Poor Content
Keywords are very important, but what can be just as important is your website content. If your pages are full of common, short, or useless pages, consumers can get bored and not find what they are looking for. If your potential customers can’t find what you’re offering or selling on your website, this can turn consumers away from your company and bring business down. Also, if your website is small with not much information on it, Google will also turn away from it, making it difficult for people to find. Google will put websites with more information, experience, and use above those with less. So the more detail you can put in your website without making it wordy, the more Google will put your company in front of the right people and the more likely the people will stay and buy your product or service.
5. Overlooking Important SEO Details
When it comes to creating an attractive website, you’ll want to attract the search engines as much as the people you’re trying to reach. If you build a page or website that doesn’t rank well with search engines, your website will be almost impossible to find. So what can cause your website to be so unnoticeable? If Google can’t index or “crawl” your website or pages on the site, it won’t rank those pages, causing your website or pages to not show up anywhere. This goes as well for pages that can’t be accessed. If you’re not careful, your website will be completely invisible across the internet and your business will be completely invisible across the internet. That’s why hiring an SEO company like Raptor Digital Marketing can help your business with such details. Hiring a professional like us can save your business from disappearing from the internet (In-depth guide to how Google Search works).
6. Identical Information
Another important SEO detail that you don’t want to overlook is placing identical content or information across your website (Duplicate Content). When you create your website, you’ll want to add unique information on every page. If you make the mistake of repeating content on different pages of your website your ranking can go down making it difficult for consumers to find your business. Repeated information can confuse the search engines and lower your ranking causing you to lose ranking power. If you don’t watch what you’re adding onto your website pages, you could lose ranking and customers. Hiring a SEO professional like Raptor Digital Marketing can be a great help in building your ranking and keep you from repeating content across your website (SEO).
7. Slow Website Rate
In addition to repeated content, if your website is slow and takes a long time to load, you’ll lose consumers. When your website is slow, consumers become bored or unimpressed and leave without waiting to see what you have to offer. Jakob Nielsen once said, “10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done.” (Response Times: The 3 Important Limits) If your page loads slowly, then the user is likely to leave which can lower your rank. If you can’t get people to visit your website consistently, then Google will lower your rank thinking you’re of less value than your competitors (SEO Mistakes That Kill Your Google Rankings). So having a decent website speed can save you from not being seen by your competitors and keep you from lowering your ranking.
8. Website Doesn’t Work For Mobile
When you’re building your website, if it’s not built to work on mobile phones, then it won’t rank well and users won’t have a great experience. If it’s improved to work on mobile, then your site can drop its ranking on Google making it more difficult for consumers to find you (Mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices). Also, so many people in this country and world own a phone and use it to find businesses. In fact, about 98% of Americans are known to own a cellphone of some kind (Mobile Fact Sheet). If your business is not optimized for mobile, many of these consumers will not be able to find you and they’re more likely to go after your competitors. So be sure to make sure your website is available through a cell phone or hire a company like us to make sure that such a transition is possible. With our experience and expertise, we can make your website appealing and rank well on Google (Same SIte, Different Device: Designing for Mobile & Desktop).
9. No SEO Plan or Goals
When you’re beginning your SEO journey, it is vital to have some kind of plan. If you don’t have some kind of end goal, you won’t get the kind of results you’re looking for. If you’re just doing random SEO and don’t have any kind of strategy, you won’t get anywhere and it’ll be a waste of your time and money (Full SEO expectations with zero framework – a common mistake). That’s why creating some kind of goal, plan, or strategy for your SEO will get you to where you want to be. Do some research and ask some questions, that’ll help you make the right plan for your business to attract more customers and make more money (help me plan my SEO strategy). Hiring a company like Raptor Digital Marketing who has experience with SEO can help you assess, plan, and execute a well producing strategy that can save you time wasting effort and money (Paid Advertising Management).
10. Unusable Links & Poor Website Architecture
For our final mistake, you must be keenly aware of whether or not your links work and if your website structure works well. Your internal links are very important to your ranking as a website (Does internal linking really make a big SEO Difference?). When they’re broken, it lowers your value with Google causing you to rank lower. Also, if your Websites structure is poor, it lowers your rank as well and can be unappealing to consumers. Your website structure needs to be taken seriously when building your website or you can lose money and customers (Site Structure Help). One great help when it comes to creating a good structure and using working links for your website is hiring professional help. We at Raptor Digital Marketing have years of experience and a knowledge of what works to build you a well structured website (Web Design & Development).
Summary:
As a whole, SEO is not easy and mistakes can be easily made. It’s good to be especially aware of keywords and how you’re using them; what kind of content you create; website speed, mobile optimization, and structure; and your SEO plan. If you can be cautious of these common mistakes, you can be more successful and attract more consumers. These things, despite how easy they sound, can take a lot of time and experience. Many businesses will do it on their own, but some of the most successful businesses hire a professional like us to help improve their ranking and their website. We at Raptor Digital Marketing have the knowledge, experience, and ability to help your business grow and beat your competition. Call us today at (702)-907-0095 to receive your free consultation and see how we at Raptor can help your business today (Raptor Digital Marketing).
