Search engine optimization can be challenging, especially for small companies that are relatively new to interacting online. Building a customer base and funneling new leads to your sites is not easy when your company is surrounded by competition, but successful businesses tend to maintain and grow their base by engaging in smart SEO practices.
Discovering the right and wrong way to optimize your site’s content takes time, and even established companies make mistakes when it comes to SEO. To avoid falling into detrimental SEO traps, it’s important to avoid the most common mistakes that other companies make when it comes to optimizing their content.
1) Optimizing the Wrong Keywords
If you find that you’re doing your best to create useful content but your site visitors spend very little time on your pages and are not converting, you may have optimized the wrong keywords. Even with great content, choosing the wrong keywords to optimize can lead to conversion issues. When it comes to long-tail keywords, it isn’t uncommon to run into challenges associated with:
- Using too many broad keywords
- Ignoring your click-through rates (CTR)
- Failing to segment your keywords geographically
- Ruining your content by adding clunky phrases to match keywords
- Choosing keywords that are not relevant to your target audience
It’s in your best interest to carefully research the SEO phrases you plan to use. Try using keyword tools to help you come up with better keyword usage. Google’s Keyword Planner is a good place to start.
2) Considering Only On-Site SEO
While it’s extremely important to optimize the content on your own website, it’s also beneficial to have optimized content on other websites that fit your industry. Networking and being able to publish your content on other companies’ websites will help convert new customers to your pages. Take time out of each month to speak with other business owners so that you can share keyword-rich content on each other’s websites. This will allow you to draw in conversions off-site.
3) Ignoring Conversion Optimization
Businesses need to pay special attention to their conversion opportunities as well as basic SEO. Unfortunately, many companies ignore this crucial step when they should be giving their leads everything that they need in order to become loyal paying customers. In addition to SEO, provide site visitors with evidence of your products’ benefits. Encourage them to check out reviews that happy customers have posted, offer them client case studies that show the success stories related to your product, and give them reasons to become customers.
The importance of getting leads to your website does not end with a simple visit. You want to encourage them to visit and stay long enough to experience what your company has to offer.
4) Failing to Write Engaging Content
Having a good deal of content on your site does not always mean that you have optimized well. It’s important to create high-quality pieces of information rather than simply shelling out post after post of lackluster content. If you’re seeking decent search engine optimization, your content needs to be engaging, informative, and somewhat long.
Blog posts should be at least 300 words (preferably more), and content needs to be uploaded frequently.
Additionally, your content needs to be readable. While it can be tempting to load your blog posts with as many keywords as possible, it may be a bad idea in the long-run. Keyword-laden blog posts are difficult to read, and they come off as spammy to site visitors, so it’s in your best interest to take the time needed to create content with keywords that fit organically.
5) Resorting to Black Hat Tactics
To add to the keywording mistake that site owners tend to make, it’s also not uncommon to see business owners knowingly or unknowingly violating search engine guidelines to reach the top of Google’s SEO ranking.
Black Hat tactics refer to practices that violate guidelines in order to influence search engine results to lean in favor of a certain website. These tactics include keyword stuffing (as mentioned above), link farming, hidden text, comment spam, and purchased links.
While these tactics might seem like they yield quick results, they are too risky to be worth the short-term gains. Google monitors websites that show up on search engine results and may penalize or even ban sites that attempt to manipulate results in their favor.
In a competitive industry, it is usually quite difficult to make your company stand out above the rest in search engine results. Keep in mind that the quick, easy way to do things is very rarely the best way to go about bringing new leads to your website. Avoid making common SEO mistakes when marketing your company, even if it means that your site is taking longer to get noticed. Engaging in fair SEO practices is the best way to succeed long-term.