Look out for these common SEO mistakes you might be making. If you’re looking to revise your digital marketing strategy, little improvements can go a long way to drive higher traffic to your site and increase ROI.
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Incomplete On-Page SEO
Often, there are many small things websites can do to fine-tune on-page elements, which from the perspective of Google, build up your site quality in tangible ways.
This includes quality web copy, which features relevant information and keywords, presented in a way that is easy to read and scan. Perhaps more overlooked elements include page titles, meta descriptions, and image tags.
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Ignoring UX
Your website functions as shop front and shopkeeper – not only do first impressions matter, how it interacts with customers after that will help or hurt the journey towards conversion. Prioritizing User Experience will aid with both conversions and SEO; a website that is fast-loading and easy to navigate is a basic foundation for a user to want to spend time reading, browsing, clicking around, shopping.
Though it’s still largely a mystery how Google measures bounce rate, it’s acknowledged that how long a user spends on a website and how much they engage with the content will affect its quality rating, and eventually, its ranking.
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Ignoring Mobile Responsiveness
As we’ve covered before, the future of retail lies in mobile-ready online shopping experiences. Google has also started experimenting with mobile-first indexing, which will prioritize websites with mobile versions when it comes to rankings. If you haven’t haven’t already, start placing more focus on optimizing your website content for mobile platforms, or risk being left behind in the dust. Ensure that your navigation, text and image content are presented the way you intend them to across mobile and desktop platforms — by making your website responsive or dynamic.
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Not Using the Right Keywords
A good rule of thumb to live by for SEO — for small businesses — is the more specific, the better. Driving traffic to your website isn’t the be-all, end-all of SEO; higher traffic does not necessarily result in conversions.
It can be easy to fall into the habit of optimizing for broad, generic keywords. While this option has its place if you have a certain purpose for doing so, optimizing by using lower-traffic phrases that are specific and also lower in competition (‘long-tail keywords’) can often lead to higher conversions.
Avoid stuffing keywords into your content — not only does this make you articles sound unnatural, Google also has algorithms that will look out for content that might sound like spam.
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Not Optimizing for Local Search
While it seems basic, an often-overlooked part of SEO is using region-specific keywords. If you’re offering goods or services in a specific city or region, avoid global keywords. How Google takes into account local search is a bit muddled and complex, but for small businesses offering a good or service, using local rather global keywords is a best practice for driving both traffic and conversions.
As always, include those keywords in page titles and meta descriptions. It will also be helpful to list your business on local business listings, as well as search engines related to businesses, e.g. Google Places and Bing — these will link back to your website and aid in search rankings.
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Not Using Analytics to See What Converts
Analytics is not only important for measuring results as you go along in your SEO strategy – it’s also important as a starting point to assess where you’re doing well and where you have opportunities to improve. Using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster can allow you to set objectives, monitor objective results, and figure out which areas are worth it to focus your efforts on.
Interested in driving more traffic to your website and getting more conversions via SEO? Contact us or fill out a form to enquire about our SEO packages or for a thorough website audit.