5 Common SEO Mistakes You May Be Making

SEO is essential for driving traffic to your site — but only if you’re using the best techniques and avoiding SEO mistakes. All too often, marketers tout the benefits of SEO without showing clients how to utilize SEO correctly. After hours and hours of effort, failed marketing campaigns can leave you feeling frustrated and exasperated. “SEO is supposed to work,” you may think. “After all this effort, why isn’t it working for me?”

We’re glad you asked. Here are some common SEO mistakes you may be making — and how to fix them.

Related Article: What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

1. Not Focusing on Conversion Rates

When you’re concentrating all your efforts on SEO, you may start neglecting another vital marketing technique: conversion rate optimization (CRO). This is a huge mistake.

Ideally, SEO and CRO should work together. The first goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your site by boosting your search engine rankings. (After all, if your customers can’t find you, how will they buy your product or sign up for your service?) However, the end goal of SEO is the same of any other marketing technique: to sell. If you’re only focusing on increasing your ranking, then you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle: making your advertising enticing to customers. You need to ensure that customers can find your content and also make sure it’s appealing enough to turn those views into clicks.

2. Using the Wrong Keywords

Are you using the right keywords for your content and audience? You should always check, double-check and even triple-check your keywords. This may be the most important step of mastering SEO. Your keywords should be incredibly relevant to your content, but they should also be common enough to appeal to a large percentage of your audience. Remember: You want to pull in a lot of viewers, but you also want those viewers to be interested in what you have to say.

When creating content, focus on the message first. Then, go back and add keywords that flow naturally within the piece and fit your target audience. Don’t rely on trendy keywords just because they’re trending (though certainly use them if they fit your product or service). When in doubt, use a service like Google’s Keyword Planner to make sure you’re on the right track.

3. Writing Poor Content

If you’re doing everything else correctly, your content is likely the problem. Terrible copy stuffed full of great keywords will still yield poor results. No one wants to read boring or overly salesy drivel; it simply wastes your readers’ time. If you can’t write well yourself, hire a professional copywriter. Good advertising copy is worth the money, and it’s likely not as expensive as you may think.

Related Article: 5 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

4. “Stuffing” Your Content

Many content marketing teams still recommend an outdated tactic: keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, search engines ranked web pages based on quantity, not quality. When these sites used keywords numerous times, they were more likely to rank highly in search results. However, this created redundant content that sometimes didn’t even make sense. Today, search engines are smarter. They still look for keywords, but they know to avoid web pages that use keyword stuffing. If you want to rank higher, you’ll need to use keywords that flow naturally. Otherwise, you may be penalized for spammy content.

Related Article: Lessons in Content Writing: Consider The Source

5. Not Optimizing Your Website

While most SEO mistakes involve content and the way it’s written, your website is also an essential part of SEO. If it’s too slow or low-quality, you risk losing readers. Even worse, many search engines push slow web pages to the bottom of search results. If you struggle with this issue, a web developer can help you speed things up. If you’d rather DIY, sites like Pingdom are available to help troubleshoot the problem.

Related Article: How To Build SEO Strategies Effectively

Final Thoughts

If you’re knee-deep in SEO and still not seeing the results you want, consider making some of the changes we’ve mentioned. You should see better performance within just a few weeks. And remember: The world of marketing is always changing; it’s best to stay dynamic.

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