Semalt Explains Harmful SEO Mistakes, Even Professionals Make
With SEOs, there are more than enough ways to make mistakes. Even as top-ranking professionals, everyone sometimes finds themselves in one of these situations and laughs because "We told you, you could become a victim." Even the best of us can make mistakes, and these are normal. However, knowing what to do next is what differentiates a professional from a student in the SEO world.
Digital marketing and drumming share a striking resemblance in the sense that both seem easy, and everyone thinks they can do it. Inevitably, those who aren't great with SEO end up writing below standard content and cannibalizes his or her other web pages as well as tarnish their slight chance of ever making it to the first page of Google SERP.
As excellent as you may be, even the best of us are subject to making mistakes, and sometimes it is a great idea to take a step back and remember the basics of SEO. As the algorithm in Google and Bing search engine continues to evolve and adopt new technologies, so should our SEO strategies.
Today, we have to keep in mind a growing list of search engine areas to consider when developing content or properly structuring a website. You now have to optimize a website for voice search, image search, keyword search, mobile users, and still maintain an active social media presence. All these compulsory areas of SEO make it look not easy and a bit overwhelming, but you should take a deep breath; we are here to help.
As much as surrounding elements may change, the core factors remain the same. So here are some common SEO mistakes that even experts make.
Possible SEO Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
Presenting a poor internal links structure: as your website continues to evolve to include new pages and content, you are bound to come across some basic internal linking errors. For example, you analyze your website, and you discover things from duplicated content to 404-page errors.
Semalt has discovered that the internal linking structure is one of the most overlooked but yet an important aspect of a website. Many webmasters fail to remember to check the structure of these links and make necessary adjustments when needed. A website's internal linking strategy can make or mar your UX and SEO strategy as a whole.
1. Internal linking serves fives valuable functions for your website:
- It provides a clear pathway to your conversion pages.
- It helps spread the authority of your websites across your webpages, even those that are deeply hidden.
- It provides relevant and more detailed information about topics that are being discussed as well as providing more interactive materials for your website traffic.
- It organizes your webpages categorically by adding keyword optimized anchor texts.
- You can communicate your best webpages to search engine crawlers.
If you resubmit an XML sitemap to search engines, you open up crawl paths for search engines to unlinked search webpages. Along this chain of thought, it is also important you use your robots.txt file and no index tag wisely. This is because it helps you avoid accidentally blocking important webpages on your site.
As a general rule, no webpage should be more than two clicks from the home page or the Call-To-Action. You should evaluate your website's architecture using fresh sets of keyword gotten from your recent keyword research to begin sorting out your webpages according to topics.
2. Creating contents for content sake
The best content management and SEO ranking practice state that you should produce and update your website content regularly to increase your brand's exposure as well as its authority and indexation rate. This becomes significantly tougher as your website grows from merely 20 webpages to hundreds of pages or more. With so many webpages, it becomes more difficult to find unique keywords for each webpage and stick to your SEO strategy.
Sometimes, SEO gurus make a mistake of assuming they have enough relevant content so they can go ahead to produce any type or quality of content to have something fresh on their websites. This doesn't seem right, and many times, it drops your overall SEO ranking because you're left with a significant amount of thin and useless content, which has only wasted your time and effort.
Before writing any content, ensure you've done your fair share of keyword research, and you are sure that such topics or keywords will rank on SERP and your website. Make sure whatever content you decide to add to your website is relevant to the target audience. It utilizes other associated keywords that make up the H2 tags and other body paragraphs.
By maintain this consistency and relevance, your web content will convey the full context of your content to search engines as well as meet the users' satisfaction on many levels. This makes up one reason why you should consider having a couple of long-form contents that remain actionable and evergreen over an extended period.
Remember, as an SEO professional; you are a content marketer and not just daily content creators like journalists. It would help if you learned to capitalize on each content you publish. One content could take months before it ranks as good as you'd like it to but when it does, make sure it remains relevant and unique to the industry.
3. Not investing in link-worthy content.
As we've come to understand, one of Google's three most important ranking factors is the quality and quantity of domains referring to a webpage. The value of link building is a major industry pull for agencies. And because we recognize this need, we can sometimes get carried away and pursue mass links. Some of the ways we seek poor quality links are guest posting, manual outreaches, and influencer marketing. All these may be good ideas, but the best way to acquire good quality links is still naturally. By posting content that people want to link to, you get true, strong quality linking that forces your website to get indexed many times by Google.
Instead of spending so much time in manual research and creating an awful load of guest posts a year, you could spend all those resources creating a one of a kind piece of content that can acquire all of those links you so desperately need.
Investing time in crafting long-form content that adds value to your website is the perfect SEO strategy. Here, you can play around with different forms of content, from resource contents to evergreen guides or even interactive quiz pages.
Rather than focusing mainly on your manual outreach, you can dedicate some of those resources into promoting a piece of content published on your website and not someone else's.
4. Failing to reach your target audience and customers with your content
If your content is irrelevant to your customers, it is irrelevant to Google. In whatever you are doing as an SEO strategy, you need to ensure that your strategy gets your targeted audience to view your content. Have you noticed that you probably invest more resources into content production than in content promotion? Sure, you try to share your content over social media, but how far does it go without paid advertising?
By simply posting your latest article on social media, you barely scratch the surface of the audience you could reach. If you're looking to acquire a new audience and leads for your business, you will need to get serious. Invest more resourcing in your promotional tactics. Here are some of the ways you can boost your audience reach
- Paid social media campaigns
- Targeted sharing using keyword-optimized hashtags
- Promoting your web contents over an influencers channel
- Strong link building
To get ranked and linked, you must market the content to make it discoverable. Only then can you get genuine organic traffic to your site.
5. Optimizing your content for the wrong keywords
Sadly this is one of the most prominent mistakes SEO professionals make. Imagine the resources as well as effort wasted when content is created and optimized for the wrong keywords. Imagine all the work you've put into creating content, and yet, it's not driving large scale traffic to your website.
To further aggravate your pain, the few clicks you do now have a very low time on page average with no conversion. This can be frustrating, yes we know, but why does this happen. The chances are that you are optimizing that content for the wrong keywords.
While most professionals understand how important long-tail keywords are for informational queries, sometimes we make mistakes such as:
- Failing to segment search volumes and competitions based on geography,
- Relying more than we should on high volume phrases that do not convert
- Focusing too many resources on broad keywords
- Ignoring our CTRs
- Ignoring AdWord value
- Allocating our targeted keywords on the wrong contents
- It would help if you chose keywords that are irrelevant to your audience.
Everyone can make mistakes. We all do even in the things we claim to be professionals. However, we need to learn from these mistakes, and the best way to figure out a solution to them is by consulting the best practices. When dealing with SEO, you should always keep your mind nimble and once in a while, take a step back to evaluate whether or not you are doing what's best for your website and business.