Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical, especially in today’s highly digital world. Optimizing your personal or business website and blog is a crucial element of your overall content marketing strategy. SEO is a powerful and effective way to attract traffic to your business website which could lead to increased sales.
SEO techniques and strategies are constantly evolving due to various search engine developments and the changing consumer behavior. It is not always easy to stay on top of the game, but there are a few common SEO mistakes that you need to avoid at all to maintain consistent results. Here are some of these mistakes that you need to avoid at all costs.
Choosing the Wrong Keywords
We can all agree that SEO is all about keywords and relevant phrases that you want your website to rank for. However, the big question remains; are you choosing the right keywords? One of the common mistakes that most people commit when it comes to choosing keywords is ignoring the search engine and user preferences for long-tail keywords.
While it is critical to define your products and services in a specific way, it is also crucial to understand the particular words and phrases that your potential customers use to refer to them. Sometimes, the term that you consider right might mean something completely different to your potential clients, or it could be too generic.
One of the best ways to avoid optimizing your website for wrong keywords is by working with a digital marketing Canada agency that will evaluate your business and help you identify the right keywords to use in your SEO strategy.
Neglecting Dated Content
The truth of the matter is that you have probably created a ton of web content over the past few years but you haven’t touched it since it was first published on your site. Keep in mind that by neglecting your content, you could be leaving out an immense opportunity that you could capitalize on to attract more visitors to your site.
You need to develop a habit of regularly checking your published content and refreshing or updating it to keep it relevant to searchers.
Dig deeper into your analytics and find out your top and worst performing web pages and blog posts and start paying greater attention to the evergreen topics. You should also conduct in-depth keyword research to establish new opportunities for updating your existing content to improve your ranking.
Allowing Broken or Poor Quality Links
All search engines recognize outbound links on your site that either don’t work or aren’t credible sources of information. Although this happens most of the time, having too many broken or poor quality links on your website can be annoying to search engines which can hurt your ranking.
On the other hand, inbound links from non-authoritative sites is also a big issue for Google. Therefore, before you publish any content to your site, make sure that all the outbound links are working properly and are authoritative.
Forgetting that Faster Is Better
Lastly, we have to touch on your site speed as well. Typically, the faster your website loading speed, the more Google will favor it. Google PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool from Google itself that helps you to check your website speed.
The tool offers you a picture of what aspects you need to improve to boost the speed of a particular webpage on your site. One of the best ways of improving your site speed is by optimizing your images.