7 Major SEO Mistakes that you may be making without knowing it

Your SEO strategy can be an essential part of marketing and growing your business online. SEO is not something you learn once and master immediately. It takes continual learning, trying, and getting it wrong as well. If you’ve ever made any SEO mistakes, you might know how this can be an important learning opportunity. In this article, you can learn about seven common SEO mistakes and how you can fix them. Perhaps these are SEO problems you already have or might face in the future. Armed with this information and insight, you can make high-impact changes to how you grow your business online.

1. Thinking About SEO Late in the Game

While it’s true to say that it’s never too late to start search engine optimization, the sooner you start, the better the results you can expect. SEO shouldn’t come as an afterthought after you have put everything else in order like your website, your social media pages, or your blog. SEO specialists everywhere recommend that you start thinking about your SEO as soon as you start developing your website. It’s much easier to build your strategy into your website content than to backtrack and redesign it later on. That being said, now is always the best time to look at common website problems that could have been caused by any of the SEO mistakes in this article.

2. Creating a Disconnect Between Your Content and User Search Intent

Every successful marketing campaign is built around knowing and understanding who the customer is. Your website design, SEO strategy, and content should all be customer-centric. When you create content for your website and your blog, the most important box it should check is that of being relevant to the intended readers. It could be the most interesting and well-written content, but if it’s not what your potential customers are after when they search for a particular term, then you are not providing the right value.

Fixing these types of SEO mistakes isn’t difficult. Begin by creating a customer persona and thinking about what questions they have and what solutions they need that your company can provide. Tailored content that adds value to the right segment of the market is the key.

3. Broken Pages and Their Backlinks

One of the most common website problems is that of broken pages. It could be that you deleted a page from your website. When someone now tries to go to that page, they could encounter the all too familiar 404 error. Another related issue is when you have internal and external backlinks pointing to the broken page.

There’s nothing wrong with making changes to your website and deleting certain pages that you feel may no longer be relevant. This issue only becomes one of the top SEO mistakes when you do nothing to fix the broken pages and backlinks. Just think about all the lost organic traffic when potential website visitors are directed to an error page. You can fix this issue by ensuring that backlinks are spelled correctly and directing to existing pages that you actually want your market to visit. The sooner you take action, the better.

4. Using Faulty SEO Approaches

There’s a lot of information out there about how to succeed with SEO and tips and tricks about how to boost your content online. At times, it can seem like a hard-to-grasp art form where trial and error is the name of the game. While there is a place for trying out various approaches to see which one is going to work, your SEO strategy must be backed by information and facts.

As elusive as SEO can seem at times, it is a data-based science that has rules. The algorithms behind how search engines work are programmed and use the data made available to them. Once you understand how SEO works, you are more likely to start using tried and tested approaches to improve your website rankings on search engines and scale up your internet reach. Knowledge is power, and it could be time to wave goodbye to SEO advice you may have followed before that is based on nothing but a hunch.

5. Publishing Poor Quality Pages

All your online content should offer some level of value to the readers and something distinct from competitors’ sites out there. If you publish too many poor-quality pages with no ‘wow’ factor, it’s highly unlikely that your content is going to rank highly in Google. If you are one of many other similar services in your time with the same kind of content, there really is nothing to differentiate your website from what already exists in the market.

The way to get around this common SEO mistake is to rethink how you structure and present your content. You may have to rewrite some pages, switch up some of the layouts to make it more user-friendly, or take some time to create an accompanying blog with more high-value content for your website visitors.

6. Not Targeting and Optimizing the Right Keywords

Keywords are so important when it comes to getting more people to your website. Some of the most prevalent SEO problems center around targeting out-of-reach keywords to rank for or not optimizing the right ones. If your website is relatively new, it’s a tall order to try to rank for the same keywords that authority websites are already ranking highly for. Instead, you can target some longer keyword phrases. As a general rule of thumb, you can start off with five-word keyword phrases and reduce the phrase length as your page authority grows with time.

As far as knowing which keywords to optimize, it goes without saying the not all keywords are equal. You want to direct more of your focus to keywords that bring in the right kind of customers—customers who actually want to find products, services, and information to solve their current challenges. You should also take some time to optimize other parts of your website as well, including your meta descriptions and the images you use on your pages.

7. Expecting Instant Results

One of the most common SEO mistakes that come up, especially with small and new businesses and websites, is to expect fast results. SEO is an organic method, and it takes time to bring in high volume and high-quality leads and to see the results of your efforts. Even if you come up with a killer SEO strategy today, you are not going to start seeing the results tomorrow or next week. Patience is a vital virtue as you navigate the space of SEO and try to market your website to the online world.

There may seem to be too many moving pieces and new updates of approaches and algorithms in the world of SEO, it’s not nearly as complicated as many people make it out to be. The best starting point is to understand the basics of SEO, come up with a strategy, then give it some time to work. Being highly adaptive and flexible is critical because there are going to be many opportunities for you to revisit your SEO strategy and make adjustments to methods that are not working as well as you might have hoped they might.

When building a website for your business, the goal is to bring in traffic from various places online and channel that traffic to buying into the services and products that you offer. If you have faced any of the common website problems that are impacting how much traffic you get, there could very well be a problem with your SEO methodology. The most common SEO mistakes include picking the wrong keywords and putting out irrelevant content. Most of the SEO problems are easy to fix, and with a bit of work and patience, you can start seeing more high-value traffic coming to your website.

But where problems just seem beyond your expertise, it may be time to recruit the services of a proven SEO agency to take your business to the next level.