#1 Forgetting About Local SEO
If you have a local business or want to target local customers, one of the things that you can’t miss out on is local SEO. If you’re not thinking about how to help people in your local area or region find you, you could be failing to bring in the leads and customers that you want. Local SEO can involve a variety of things and isn’t just using local keywords in your content. While that’s part of it, it’s also important to do things like setting up your Google My Business page and getting your business put on the map (literally). People should be able to find your business on Google Maps, especially if you have a store or another physical location open to the public.
#2 Publishing Boring or Irrelevant Content
SEO content is an essential part of any SEO strategy. But, in recognizing its importance, a lot of people rush to publish lots of content and forget to really consider the quality of it. Good content needs to be engaging and relevant to your keywords and your website. It has to provide search engine users with the information and entertainment that they’re looking for. If your content isn’t very exciting or it’s not what your audience and search engines want to see, it’s less likely to rank highly in search engine results. Make sure you’re taking the time to research what sort of content you should be creating and how to ensure it’s engaging.
#3 Ignoring Mobile SEO
You might think that your SEO efforts will be valid across all kinds of devices. After all, search engines are search engines, right? But if you’re not thinking about mobile SEO, you could be losing a big part of your audience due to being penalized by search engines. Mobile-friendliness is a crucial factor for today’s SEO as mobile searches have now overtaken desktop searches. People use all types of devices and your website needs to be suitable for all of them. When people are using mobile devices, they need to be able to find you and they need to have a good user experience when they land on your website. A site that’s slow or hard to use on mobile devices can perform poorly in search engines.
#4 Duplicate Content
Another content mistake that you might be making is displaying duplicate content on multiple pages. Firstly, it’s essential to make sure you’re not plagiarizing content from other sources. This is definitely frowned upon, not just by search engines but also by the law. Apart from making sure you don’t steal from anyone else, you also need to make sure you don’t have duplicate content on several pages, even if it’s your own content. Search engines don’t like it and it doesn’t look very good for your website visitors either. Even if you only have a small amount of content, such as on a product page, make sure it’s unique.
#5 Overlooking Metadata
Meta titles and descriptions are not a ranking factor for search engines. However, just because search engines don’t take them into account when deciding how to rank your content, it doesn’t mean that they’re not important. Your meta description tells people what to expect on the page when your website appears in search results. Without it, you will have a default excerpt showing instead. It’s not always necessary to have a meta description on every page, but it can be useful to include on your most important pages. Your meta descriptions will convince people to click on the link to your website, increasing your traffic and the number of visits that Google tracks.
#6 Forgetting About Humans
SEO is essential, but you have to remember that it can’t be all about machines and algorithms. You need to appeal to search engines but what search engines increasingly want you to do is make content for people. Google has moved toward wanting more natural content that gives people what they’re looking for instead of just checking off boxes with keywords and other technical aspects. Of course, the technical elements are important too, but it’s essential to put your user before search bots if you want to create valuable content.
#7 Out-of-date SEO
SEO is always moving, making it crucial to keep up with the latest changes. It’s never possible to know exactly what the Google algorithm is looking for but SEO experts are always discovering new ways to improve the performance of websites and content. SEO isn’t something that you can just “set and forget”. It’s something that requires a long-term strategy to ensure you keep adding to it. As SEO practices move on, you might also need to look back at things that you have already done and update them to ensure your SEO isn’t out of date. An SEO audit can check to see if there are any SEO problems that need to be corrected and any updates that you need to make.
You could be making some big mistakes with SEO without really knowing it. If you’re not sure where you might be going wrong, getting expert help makes it easier to get on the right track. Start with an SEO audit to reveal what you have been doing right and what you might be getting wrong so that you can fix and significant problems.
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