Common SEO Mistakes You Might Be Making

SEO can be challenging and often involves a lot of time and energy for good results. That is why it is so important to ensure that you aren’t hurting your efforts by inadvertently making errors. As a website design firm with well over a decade in the business, we have seen a lot and done a lot giving us a good perspective to talk about common SEO mistakes you might be making.

Mistakes can happen and really there is not much you can do about it the first time it happens. However what you can control is learning about those mistakes and then making corrective actions so that they won’t plague you in the future. With that being said…

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

• Lack of Mobile Optimization – Being properly optimized for mobile only helps your SEO efforts and not being optimized will hurt you. Google places a premium on their mobile users and how they rank both sites and content reflects that. So if your site is not optimized for mobile then don’t be surprised if your SEO rankings aren’t as high as you think they should be.
• Slow Load Speeds – Similar to a lack of mobile optimization, speed is another important ranking signal because it directly relates to bounce rates and time on site. When Google sees those numbers trending the wrong way for those stats it typically means users are having a bad experience which in turn ranks your site lower.
• Title Tag Problems – Title tags and meta descriptions are both valuable aspects of your overall SEO. You need to ensure they are both optimized properly to then improve the overall performance of your content.
• Duplicate Content – Duplicate content comes in two forms; on-site duplication and web-wide duplication. The former occurs when you write articles on the same topic using the same keywords that are simply too similar in nature. Now there is nothing wrong with removing and underperforming piece of content and replacing it with something better but it is a mistake to simply publish something that is a duplicate. The other issue is when you in essence create a piece of content that plagiarizes something else already out there. In both cases your rankings will suffer.
• Content and Keyword Relevance – The content your create needs to align with the keywords being used because Google and other search engines want users to find what they are looking for. If your content isn’t relative to the keywords people are searching for, such as writing an article on craft beer and using keywords related to lawn care, then it won’t rank very well.
• Using the Wrong Keywords – Sometimes people pick keywords based on what they think is most relevant rather than understanding the keywords customers are using to find products or services like the ones you offer. This is an important distinction to be aware of. You should use available tools like Google AdWords KeywordPlanner to help ensure you are using what people are searching for.
• Keyword Stuffing – So people make the mistake, either on purpose or accident, of using too many keywords on your website and in your content. Search engines typically consider pages or content stuffed with too many keywords as ‘spammy’ which in turn reduces your SEO.

The bottom line is that search engine optimization is an important part of many businesses online marketing strategy. Avoiding common SEO mistakes you might be making is just as important as creating good content. Otherwise you are putting yourself in a two-steps-forward but one-step-back scenario which is not most effective approach.

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