So you think your website is currently optimized properly? You might be wrong. There are a lot of SEO mistakes to be made, but we’ll review some of the more common ones. Proper optimization for search engines is crucial to your website and business in order to get those all-important clicks and leads. It can help to get excellent traffic onto your site and from there can lead into sales. On top of that, users consistently seeing your website ranked highly on the search engine results page (SERP) will, over time, build a perception in their mind about your company. Because of the way users interact with search engines, the user puts trust into the engine to provide the most correct information for whatever query they have. Having your website ranked highly by the search engine, therefore, will build trust in the user.
Your business is competing with many other businesses in the same industry, so why not put in the effort into correctly optimizing your website? If you and a few competitors are selling the exact same product, the difference in having your site ranked higher than theirs is huge. That can be the difference between getting more traffic and ultimately converting that into more sales.
It’s important to keep up on your analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t, so that if there’s something wrong you can adjust your course and right the ship.
1. Creating Poor Content
One of the biggest mistakes your website can make is to publish poor content. Your focus should be on creating less but better content. Creating a plethora of mediocre content may seem like an okay route to take, but I can assure you it’s not. The poorer the content, the less it will get shared and linked by others. However, if you spend more time creating quality, unique content, you’re more likely to get it linked by other sites. Good content can lead to more traffic and potentially more sales. Even if it doesn’t necessarily lead to more sales, it can still position your company as an authority on that topic/content. Doing this consistently will help your website in the long run.
2. Improper Internal Linking
Once you build up proper content and a variety of webpages on your site, it’s important to link to them whenever warranted. However, don’t fall into the trap of linking just for the sake of linking. If your content is about bears, don’t link to a page about lions. The user is going to click that link, quickly scroll through your page, and then immediately leave—which will then effect your bounce rate. Google’s algorithm is going to recognize that your site is linking to content that’s completely different, and that’s going to work against your website in terms of SEO.
Whatever you’re linking, make sure it’s done naturally. Stuffing a link in there is going to look awkward to the user, and can ultimately turn them off and give them a negative perception of your site.
3. Poor Mobile User Experience Is One Of The Most Common SEO Mistakes
Having a friendly user experience for your website is key to having traffic not only come to your website, but to stick around and ultimately create sales. All websites are desktop-friendly, which is great—but sites need to ensure now that they are also mobile-friendly. Mobile searching has overtaken desktop searching, and it’s vital to your business that your website is optimized for mobile use. Google’s search algorithm favors mobile-friendly websites when bringing up searches on phones or tablets.
Also consider the load speed of your website. Users don’t want to wait around too long after clicking a link. And by “too long”, I mean more than about three seconds. If your page isn’t loading almost instantly, the user is likely going hit that back button and leave your page. If this consistently happens, it’s going to hurt your SEO, as this is something that Google’s algorithm takes into account when ranking your page. If your website is mobile-friendly, that’s just another feather in your cap and one less SEO mistake to worry about.
4. Getting Backlinks By Low-Quality Domains
It’s always nice to see other websites linking to your site and content. It probably puts a nice smile on your face. But beware of low-quality domains linking back to you. It’s important to try and ensure that the types of sites that link back to you are of high domain authority. Domains are given scores from 1-100. Obviously the higher the number, the better domain authority the website has. All new websites start with a domain authority score of one. It’s better to have fewer backlinks with higher domain authority rather than a multitude of low domain authority backlinks. Domain authority takes into account various aspects of a website such as number and quality of links they’re getting, age of the domain, quality of the traffic they get, and more.
To avoid this SEO mistake, make sure to regularly check domain authority from various websites. The easiest way to do this is to create a free account on Moz.com and download the MozBar Chrome Toolbar Extension.
5. Not Utilizing Unique Titles For Each Page
Obviously your website is going to have a number of different pages that each have unique content. One of the big mistakes websites can make is naming each page the same thing. Google’s algorithm can understand the type of content that your page has and if the name of your specific page isn’t congruent with that content. Try to offer some detail into what the page is about. If your page is about wedding venues, make sure to title the page “Wedding Venues”. It’s important to make every page have a unique name, because otherwise the Google algorithm may think you have duplicate content on all of these pages.
Here’s an example of one of our clients, Pure Touch Laser Center. You can see how their laser hair removal page has its own unique name.
As we stated earlier, the good thing about these SEO mistakes is that they’re correctable. Since SEO is a long-term process, making one of these SEO mistakes isn’t going to make or break your website’s future, so long as you recognize them and make the necessary corrections sooner rather than later. There are other SEO mistakes that users regularly make but these are some of the ones we consistently see.
