In a world where technology is fast-paced and ever-growing, Search Engine Optimization is essential for businesses to manage, monetize and promote their services online. Whether you are new to SEO, or fairly familiar with SEO practices, mistakes are easy to overlook at times and can cause massive damage to the site’s rankings on the search engine results page.
Organic search results accumulate a total of 64% of all search engine results and a small room for error hurts the rankings as well as your company’s traffic. It is crucial to have basic knowledge of how to fix errors and what to avoid.
Getting Started With SEO
Search Engine Optimization is all about making small, but considerable changes to your website. Individually, these changes don’t seem like a lot, but when paired with other optimizations, they make for a noticeable improvement in your website’s performance and user experience.
Websites are made for user benefit, and the ones that make the user experience (UX) better are always ranked higher on any search engine results page. SEO helps search engines understand and present the content relevant to the user, which in turn helps other users discover your content.
Common Mistakes In SEO Practices To Avoid
Mistakes are a part of human nature, and when it comes to SEO, it is impossible to avoid these mistakes at all times. So, what are some common mistakes that digital marketers tend to make in their SEO strategies? Read along and find out for yourself!
Not Performing Routine Audits
All effective SEO practices require constant monitoring, and it is very simple to let things slip through small cracks that form when there is no auditing.
Technical audits help uncover a lot of SEO mistakes, such as linking problems, indexation issues, and discrepancies in the content. Waiting for months between full-scale audits can leave critical errors in the site and affect your rankings badly.
Even for a small-scale website, it is advised to not go two weeks without auditing your websites. SEO tools like SEMRush help you understand and work on the mistakes in your site and even show you the results in numerical and graphical formats.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing can be described as the process of overloading a web page with keywords to tamper with its rankings in the results pages.
Overusing keywords is very harmful to a website, especially if the keywords are out of context. They hurt the rankings as well as the user experience on the web pages. Filling out your websites with keywords and numerical creates a negative user experience which hurts your site’s rankings.
Information-rich content with the appropriate use of keywords is the only way to help your website do better on the Search Engine Results Pages.
Not Keeping In Mind The Search Intent
Simply looking at a long list of keywords and selecting the ones with the highest search volumes may seem like a smart idea, but selecting keywords without knowing the consumer’s search intent does no good to the rankings of your page.
For example, suppose you are looking for oil for your car and you search for ‘Car oil‘ on Google. The result page only shows content relevant to car oil, not just any oil. This is the power of machine learning. Google understands the intent for every search made on the platform and provides results that resonate with it.
Ignoring Site Speed
Slow site speed is a ranking killer, and one of the most major mistakes you as a digital marketer could make. All search engines want a friendly and unique experience for their users and their algorithms ensure no site with slow loading speed makes it to the top of a results page.
If your website is packed with unnecessary scripts and uncompressed images, it leads to unbearably slow loading times, proving to be a big failure in this technologically expeditious world.
Must Read: How to Optimize Your WordPress Site for Core Web Vitals
Ignoring Mobile Users
Mobile SEO is not one of the latest discoveries in SEO strategies but it surely has proved to be revolutionary. In fact, mobile searches make up for a total of 64% of searches on a website.
With concepts like accelerated mobile pages (AMP), and mobile-friendly user interfaces, digital marketers have adopted strategies to make their websites mobile-friendly, yet there are many agencies that are missing out on probable leads and losing rankings rapidly.
Ignoring Mobile users while optimizing your website may cause it to lose massive amounts of revenue and your page might never rank high on any search engine results page.
Conclusion
While all of these SEO mistakes hurt your rankings and chances of making it to the top of any result page, with a calculated approach they can be easily fixed.
It might take some time, but working on the mistakes that have been made ensures that no similar mistakes are made in the future. Read more blogs here or connect with us to get the maximum out of your organic strategy.