Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key area of allocating your business’s digital marketing budget because it keeps your website from falling into invisibility. This will mean that customers will be more accessible, brands will have new avenues to promote themselves, the user’s experience is enhanced and there are more opportunities to convert leads into actual clients. In any business, the higher the position in the natural search results, the more unique it gets in organic search and search engines think about it as a high authority in the industry that provides useful information for user search needs. Therefore, consumers tends to consider your company as trustworthy, click at your site, and in conclusion convert.
The fact that a great majority of the business owners comprehend the essence of SEO-assisted website traffic generation is not enough if they can’t successfully execute their SEO plans effectively. On-page, off-page, and technical SEO mistakes can negatively impact your Google rankings and profitability as a business owner. The blog post will be a guide about costly SEO mistakes which are hurting your site’s search engine rankings and recommendations on how they can be avoided.
Not Updating Your Strategy
SEO is not you do it once create a website, and your job is finished. You need to do SEO all the time to keep your website in a good ranking. Search engines are changing their algorithms differently so as to provide users with improved services trying to find the results that users search much relevant. By this I mean that, you can easily be taken below your current rankings if you have no relationship with the latest rankings. Even the most brilliant SEO strategies require updating from time to time to keep up with the latest similar strategies and the new tools or approaches. Alternatively, you settled for rankings and website visibility on your site that will surely drop and lose out for most leads and sales that you gained when you straight out ignoring to update your marketing strategy.
EXULTS, a search engine optimization agency, emphasizes that “outdated search engine optimization strategies could be adding unnecessary weight to your rankings, resulting in a decline in visibility. If your SEO strategy hasn’t been audited and revised within the last six months and your traffic has declined, it’s time for an overhaul. The search results landscape has changed drastically over the last few years, and tactics that worked previously are now negatively impacting rankings.”
Not Conducting Keyword Search
Some business owners randomly create website content without doing keyword research and expect good search traffic. This is not the best approach to content creation because if no one searches using the topics you write about, then no user will click through any of your pages. This mistake is why most website pages don’t get traffic from search engines.
To avoid this, you should ensure that your page targets specific keywords with search traffic potential. A thorough search will equip you with information about current keyword search volumes and rankings standings. Although keyword search is crucial, you must avoid overstuffing your content with them to avoid sacrificing the natural flow of your content or making it challenging for users to understand.
Duplicating Content
Duplicate content refers to content that is an exact copy or similar to the content on other pages of your website. You may think that sharing the same content on different pages of your website with a few tweaks is a smart thing to do. However, it can have negative consequences, such as creating issues with the indexing of your website since search engines try to show pages with distinct information. You don’t want the wrong version of your page to show up on Google search results or have chaotic page rankings.
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To fix an issue of duplicate content, you want to audit your website and add unique content to one of your site’s duplicate pages. You may also consider using a 301 redirect from the duplicate pages to the original one or adding a canonical link to your duplicate page telling Google and other search engines which page to show in search engine result pages (SERPs). A canonical link is the link to the page that a search engine chooses as the most representative of duplicate web pages. It helps internet users see only one version of your otherwise duplicate content in their search results.
Not Optimizing Your Images
Image optimization is a crucial factor that significantly impacts the user experience. It involves reducing your image resolution size to prevent it from taking up too much of your web storage space. It is possible to compress images while still maintaining their quality. Failure to optimize your images can slow down your website, making it difficult to navigate and use due to longer loading time.
Furthermore, you should include alt text tags for your images to explain what your pictures are showing. This enables screen reading software to narrate the depiction of your images to users with visual challenges. As a best practice, your alt texts should be unique, descriptive, and natural without unnecessarily stuffed keywords.
