Part of your content marketing strategy is to optimize your website and blog. While it is true that SEO is changing, it still retains the topmost position as a powerful way through which businesses can bring visitors to their outlets and redirect them through their sales funnel. The changing perspective of users and the evolution around search engines make SEO methods to be some of the most dynamic.
Lots of businesses are falling into the trap of not employing SEO as it should. The result of this is that your traffic and conversion rates will start taking a nosedive. The following mistakes are avoidable and can form your springboard to professional SEO management.
Picking the Wrong Keywords
Optimizing is majorly concerned with keywords for which the business wants to rank for. The question is, are you choosing the right ones? One of the mistakes commonly committed in the selection of keywords is neglecting the presence of users and search engines for longtail keywords. It is important to first understand the words your potential customers use to refer to your products. Don’t go for generic keywords, instead go for the targeted keywords that have a huge following.
Keyword Stuffing
You may be having the right set of keywords, but the way you place them in your content can either dwarf or boost your rankings. When you go overboard with your keyword usage, search engines will register your site as spammy. This will hurt your SEO performance.
Keyword stuffing is simply overusing the intended keywords. Apart from attracting penalties from search engines, keyword stuffing makes the content unnatural and pretty much useless. Google is employing a semantic search known as latent semantic indexing. Through this program, Google quickly recognizes the topic of your content even without the need to stuff keywords.
Creating Content Unrelated to Keywords
This is a pitfall most businesses find themselves in. When you create content, and insert certain words that are unrelated, your content is likely to be punished by Google through lower rankings. Most people forcefully fit keywords and this creates low quality work. Your focus and primary goal should be the production of corresponding content to your target audience needs. The result of this is that search engines will not manage to trace your content and thus a lower ranking.
Publishing Unoriginal Content
The quality of your content matters not just to search engines, but also to your readers. When you duplicate text, search engines will penalize you. This is because copying and plagiarizing content is not just punishable by search engines, but also unattractive to readers. Instead of ripping off content from other places through software, create your own original and meaningful text. Alternatively, get a professional SEO company that offers various packages which include content creation and management.
Missing Quality Links
External links you include in your content matters so much in terms of quality than quantity. If you link irrelevant sites, your website can also take a beating because of the associated quality. Only link back to sites that you consider authoritative and potential for bringing traffic in the future. The anchor text you use should be effective and beneficial to your readers if they want to find out more on the subject.
Other SEO mistakes include going astray with your internal linking, failure to invest in a fast and mobile-friendly user experience, and forgetting about the analytics.