Avoid These SEO Mistakes That Sabotage Your Marketing Strategy
Anyone involved in online marketing has heard about SEO in their sleep. It is crucial to marketing efforts, and it directly affects the bottom line. Large firms employ people specifically to concentrate on this one specific aspect, and for a good reason. SEO refers to search engine optimization. It makes a website discoverable to the market bringing in large numbers of convertible traffic which equates to massive profits. There is an exact science to SEO, and anyone who says otherwise probably isn’t directly involved. What makes SEO tricky is its complexity, as well as the fact that the digital landscape is continually changing and changing fast. It is imperative to stay on top of things and continuously tweak your strategy to accommodate emerging trends. It is easy to make mistakes, and many will ultimately kill your marketing campaign. Here are some errors that you’ll want to avoid in your SEO strategy.
Not Designing for the User
You hear a lot about keywords and backlinks but not much about website design. That is the root of most evil when it comes to SEO. A website should be designed specifically with the user in mind. If yours wasn’t, go back to the drawing board and make changes. Think about the last five sites that you visited. Were they easy to navigate? How fast did the pages load? What device were you using? These are all crucial. Users want to be able to reach a site from the device they are on quickly and navigate it easily. Your website should be mobile-friendly and fast-loading. There is no excuse for anything else. It also needs to be easy to navigate from any device. If your site is mobile-friendly, but the tabs are too small or too close together on the mobile version, you’ll see a lot of false clicks that will send the wrong message to Google.
Not Incorporating Local Search Signals
Unless you are a national business, you should be incorporating local search signals. Local search terms are high volume, always. Search engines tend to favor local businesses in queries because of this. Why wouldn’t you incorporate local signals? A high percentage of queries are location-based, and they typically get location-based results. If you don’t include local SEO into your campaign, you are missing out on a lot of traffic. Just be careful not to overdo it; there are penalties for keyword stuffing.
Overlooking Quick Answers
Quick answers are a new stomping grounds for Google. They aim to answer “what is …” and “how to …” quickly, even before the user finishes asking the question. Becoming one of these quick-answer results is an incredibly quick way to garner organic traffic. When people land on your homepage, do they know what your company does, exactly? Your home page should convey the company’s purpose quickly and directly. If it does, then you may be well on your way to having a quick answer-worthy site, which will undoubtedly help get your page to the top of the SERPs.
Not Posting Long-Form Content
When search-bots crawl a site, they look for certain signals. When Google returns a query, they do the same thing. They want to know that users are finding comprehensive and authoritative information. The algorithms are programmed to look for comprehensive long-form content. Most people won’t tell you that even though its true. Do a quick search for anything. The top three results are long-form authoritative content. Keep this in mind when posting.
Ultimately, you can short-circuit your SEO strategy in just a few moments if you aren’t watching out for these mistakes that a lot of webmasters make. There is no reason to spend all the time and effort in marketing if you aren’t watching out for errors that could cost you tons of money in the long run. After reading through this, you should be a lot more confident in your SEO strategy and ready to jump to the top of the search rankings.