Seven SEO Mistakes You Might Be (Unintentionally) Making
Search Engine Optimisation (or, SEO for short) is an integral digital practice that you should be monitoring, maintaining and building upon daily to ensure your website’s (ongoing) growth and success. So, if you don’t know about SEO, or are a bit unsure about it, you’ve come to the right place.
The demands of SEO and the opportunities that the strategy presents are ongoing, so it’s important that if you run a business or maintain a website, that you stay in the loop when it comes to common SEO errors.
When talking to new clients or auditing new businesses, there are a few common SEO mistakes that we see. We’ve listed some of the most common below…
- Ignoring Search Intent
There’s no point in creating content for your website if it’s not content that consumers want to see and read. Take the time to investigate and research your customer profile, current trends, consumer behaviour and gaps in the market (and content) to ensure you’re creating content with the most potential. Tools such as Answer The Public are really helpful when it comes to this.
- Overlooking Meta Data
When it comes to SEO practices, one of the biggest SEO mistakes we see is clients overlooking the importance of Metadata. In search engine optimisation, Metadata refers to the meta titles and meta descriptions that essentially help search engines such as Google and Bing understand what content your website (and individual page) contains.
Meta titles and meta descriptions are also visible in search engine results, so it’s important to ensure that these contain relevant information with suitable keywords to maximise your click-through rate and signal to potential consumers that your website matches their search intent.
- Duplicate Content
Trying to save time by copying and pasting content from different pages (or even worse, different websites) across your site? Please, stop.
Duplicate content is so easily avoided. By creating duplicate content, you are damaging your chances of catching that all-important and elusive top organic spot, leading to traffic, ranking and ultimately, customer loss.
If you’re implementing duplicate content across your website (intentionally, or otherwise), you run the risk of Google penalising you. Search engines recognise that you’re not generating new, fresh content, and that you’re essentially stealing from other people’s websites and businesses. You’re going to get penalised by doing this, and your site health is going to suffer from it.
- There’s No Google My Business In Sight
One of the first things you should do when setting up a website for your business is of paramount importance – and it’s free! So, there’s no excuse.
Having Google My Business set up not only makes it easier for customers (and prospective customers) to find you in the search engine results, but it’s hugely important to local businesses. Easily showcase your businesses website, contact details, location and more to your customers and improve the customer experience one step at a time.
- Ignoring Technical SEO
It’s all well and good writing and implement regular blog and page content, a common SEO mistake is ignoring the technical aspects of search engine optimisation. The technical side of SEO is just as important as on-page SEO. Technical SEO encapsulates features such as:
- Header Tags
- Metadata
- 404 Pages
- Page Speed
- Canonical Tags
Whilst these technical SEO areas can be time consuming to fix, they make the world of difference. A simple side audit can identify these issues and where they arise, and that’s definitely something we can help you with.
- Buying Backlinks
Looking to up your website’s backlink profile to improve your domain ranking (often referred to as domain authority) and not sure how to do this organically? Thinking of turning to purchase some backlinks? Stop right there.
Not only is buying backlinks completely against Google regulations and guidelines (which means you’ll get penalised if you get caught), buying backlinks is a huge no in the SEO community and these kinds of shortcuts won’t reward you in the long run.
The best way to gain backlinks is through organic strategies such as utilising your network, creating guest blogs and finding broken links that you can utilise yourself… just to name a few.
- Being Unrealistic
Last but not least, one of the most common SEO mistakes that we come across as an agency is unrealism. When you first launch a website, you need to be aware of the competition. You also need to be aware that good search engine optimisation practices take time.
You can’t expect to rank in the number one organic spot right away. That just won’t happen.
You need to ensure you are searching for (and implementing) more realistic keywords, with search volumes that are attainable and achievable. With the growth of your site health, you can build from there. It’s all about patience!
Summary
These are common SEO mistakes that we regularly see when talking to new clients. If you’re struggling with some of these SEO errors, or other SEO mistakes that we haven’t mentioned here, here at Talking Stick, we can advise or implement tailored SEO strategies to help your business rank in the best way possible.
