SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2021
Focusing heavily on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts within your business is an excellent way to drive organic traffic and long-term growth. However, SEO takes a lot of time, consistency, and skill.
Focusing heavily on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts within your business is an excellent way to drive organic traffic and long-term growth. However, SEO takes a lot of time, consistency, and skill.
As SEO is already a long game, you shouldn’t make it even longer by making mistakes. Here are some of the top mistakes businesses make with their SEO strategy and should be avoided at all costs.
1. Not Utilizing The Right Keywords
Keywords are used to optimize your content and high-level pages, in order to increase their visibility in the search engine results page (SERP). However, not utilizing the right keywords can cause chaos.
The wrong keywords, although may look like they are driving a lot of traffic, but will be driving the wrong kind of traffic. The users usually have no intent to purchase from you, and it will skew your analytics completely, as you won’t be able to accurately analyze the data properly to see what is working well.
It is also a problem if you are using keywords that are too broad because they tend to be the most competitive, which means they are much harder to rank for. Efforts on increasing traffic should be from your ideal customers if you want to maximize your effort, which means developing a strategy with long-tail keywords that have the right intention behind them.
2. Not Using Analytics To Its Full Extend
Google, and many other companies, offer free analysis tools for you to use and track your customer data. You may use them to track the organic traffic that you are driving in, but there is so much more to these tools than traffic.
There are many reasons why you might be driving in traffic, and it is important to dive into everything the tools offer and unpack what is happening. Look at what is working, what isn’t, what the reasons are, as well as what is converting.
Conversion rates are a real key analytic you should be focusing on, as it might be the pages that receive the least traffic that convert well. These statistics will enable you to investigate and adapt future strategies, which will only improve your visibility and conversions.
3. Ineffective Optimization
Optimization is a key part of SEO, and can very easily be done incorrectly. The way you optimize your website will also differ depending on your business, location, industry, market, and goals.
Firstly, all your pages should have unique keywords, or they risk competing with themselves and diluting the importance of each page, and the same goes for meta and alt tags.
Secondly, your optimization should not be broad or generic, instead, your optimization strategy should be based on thorough research that is specific to your business and driving intentional organic traffic. It is also important to consider your location.
If you are a local business, you should include location-specific keywords, local citations, local business collaborations, name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistency, and much more in your optimization strategy.
To avoid mistakes in your SEO strategy, save time and money, you may consider hiring an SEO agency to steer your business in the right direction for growth.