Your business competitor’s speeding ahead of you in the search engine rankings, is a result of their consistent good SEO practices.
While you have to refuse to involve yourself in a budget-friendly marketing strategy that will drive organic traffic from your target customers to your website.
Businesses that get leads from their website on a regular basis know that a well-managed SEO strategy will strengthen other marketing aspects of your business.
But the great question is, why are many business owners still making some common mistakes with their SEO campaigns.
SEO fundamentals remain the same, it is a marketing strategy that needs consistent attention and the necessary action to generate organic traffic.
You actually don’t need to be a professor of computer science or marketing before you can start your SEO campaign yourself and master it.
Instead of wasting your marketing budget on a bad SEO campaign and hiring the same SEOs who constantly repeat the same mistakes, which cost your business leads and sales.
Your competitor shouldn’t be making a lot from SEO, while you fold your arms and watch them do it.
Start your SEO campaign by staying aware of these nine (9) most common SEO practices to avoid, if you want better results that will increase your business revenue.
Nine (9) Common SEO Practices to Avoid
1. The use of generic keywords for every of your page.
Your SEOs understand the need to develop a list of user keywords in the search engine that they want your business to rank for.
What they often get wrong is optimizing every of your web page with generic keyword phrases.
Instead of stuffing your page with generic key phrases, you will see better quality results if you optimize your web page with long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are specific and targeted keywords that will increase your business growth if written properly.
Using long-tail keywords will also let you create a logical website structure that your potential customers and search engines will love.
2. Overuse of industry terms.
As a business owner, you are not supposed to be using industry terms for your target customers because they might likely not understand what you are talking about.
Using industry terms might sound normal to you or your business team members but not sound normal to your target customers.
If you are fond of using industry terms for SEO write up, then you need to stop it and avoid using too much of your industry jargon, it might look familiar to you but it is likely it is unknown to the public.
Google search engine wants to give users the experience, so your content must be on how they can solve their problem, you are supposed to be a solution provider through your web content.
And if you make use of industry terms, you need to make sure you explain in terms what it means so that your target customers would not visit your competitor's website searching for the meaning of industry terms they found on your website.
You should also prevent yourself from the over usage of technical words to explain things on your website, if you are doing it, then you need to stop it, it will affect your website's ranking in the google search engine.
SEO success depends on various factors, it depends if you are providing solutions to the search queries of your target customers and if you are targeting the relevant keywords on the search engine.
While choosing the right keywords for your website, you need to choose important keywords that are only related to your business.
You can make use of Google Keyword planner in Adwords or you make use of Ubbersuggest, which is good for displaying past queries that people have searched for.
You can also make use of Google Trends, it is a free tool by Google that let you learn about the behavior of target customers as time goes by, it gives you the information about what they look for online and the kind of keywords they use to look for it.
3. Optimizing your web content for search engines and not customers.
You are supposed to write your web content for your target customers and not for the search engine crawling bot.
To write higher in the search engine, you need to provide valuable content for the keywords that your potential customers are searching for online.
You can start by first doing research on the relevant keywords that your target customers are actively searching for on the web and provide a solution to that keyword query.
You will also include the keywords in your page URLs, headings and subheadings, body content, images alt, video e.tc.
After then you can publish it on your website
This practice if done regularly, will give your website relevance and authority and the search engine will increase your website ranking in the search engine.
Because the only thing that can increase your web traffic is when you talk about your target customer's wants and needs.
If they find your website valuable they will stick around for long, and the longer they stay the more the search engine will rank your website higher.
Your target customers and not the search engine must be your first priority when you write for your web.
Write detailed articles about the information that is giving them sleepless nights and your website ranking and sales will increase.
4. Linking to and from non-authoritative sources.
A huge amount of business owners still engage themselves in past SEO practices when it comes to link building.
They think the quantity of the backlinks they get matters more than the quality of the link.
Although it is true that websites with many high-quality backlinks have the potential of ranking higher and above websites with fewer quality links.
Whether it is high-quality backlinks or low-quality backlinks, what really matters is that the link is quality.
You should avoid accepting links from non-authoritative websites.
Focusing on high-authority websites will raise your website to a credibility position in the eye of the search engines and your customers will also gain more knowledge from the website you link to.
Linking to spam websites is not good for the reputation of your business and it gives your target customers a poor experience.
5. Not optimizing your website for mobile devices
In Today’s world, I don’t think there are websites that are still not mobile-friendly, but I was wrong.
From my research, I found out that there are still many business websites that give awkward and poor experiences to their mobile visitors.
More people now use their mobile devices instead of desktop computers to search for products and services.
If you really want to increase your sales through the search engine then you need to have a mobile-friendly website that will not be difficult for your target customers to navigate.
Your failure to address this issue will damage the growth of your business and drive your target customers away from you and it will also damage your SEO strategy.
You need to make it easier for your target customers to find you on their mobile devices because that is where they spend most of their time.
For eCommerce businesses, you need to make sure that your mobile website has an excellent user experience and that it is easy for your customers to check out when they want to make a purchase.
6. Using Black Hat SEO strategies
Some businesses try to cheat the search engine in a bid to rank their website faster.
This SEO practice is a bad practice that the search engine frowns at and it is not a good SEO practice for long-term strategy.
If you are caught by the search engine practicing black hat SEO, you will be penalized and if not carefully your website might be banned from the search engine.
If you can’t handle your SEO alone, you can outsource it to an SEO Professional that will follow the rule of SEO best practices.
7. Focusing on traffic alone.
Increasing the organic traffic of the target customers that come to your website is one of the best and biggest benefits of a search engine optimization campaign.
Because looking at it, 60% of website traffic comes from search engines.
But at the same time, your search engine optimization campaign goal should not only be about increasing your website's organic traffic.
You should also use your SEO effort to generate leads and drive conversions.
8. Ignoring social media SEO.
Most businesses focus solely on their website SEO strategy while neglecting their social media channels and search engine strategy.
If you have active social media profiles, it can help your website traffic and search engine rank too.
You should fill the necessary section of your social media profiles with relevant keywords, and you should also make sure you include your website link in your social media profile.
If you publish any new blog post on your website, you should make sure you share it across your social media channels to drive traffic from social media to your website, and you should also not forget to add social media share buttons to your blog posts so that your website visitors can easily share your blog post to their social media friends if they find it valuable.
9. Expecting instant results
Of course, this is the biggest and most common SEO mistake business owners make.
Once they have put in the effort and optimized their website for the search engine, they become eager to see results right away.
But the truth of it is that SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and to rank higher on the search engine, you need to be consistent and regularly publish valuable and quality content that will demonstrate the expertise and knowledge you have in your business industry.
CONCLUSION:
Some businesses make other SEO mistakes that did not make my list as there are numerous SEO mistakes businesses make.
But the lists of mistakes I write about in my blog post are the most common mistakes businesses make.
As a result of these and not to keep wasting your SEO budget and effort, you need to find and hire an SEO professional that provides a competitive SEO strategy with good SEO practices that will make the search engine and your target customers fall in love with your website, which will increase both your website traffic and sales.