As a business owner you probably spend a lot of time looking for ways to make your website more visible, generate leads, improve your website’s rankings in the SERPs, and boost your ROI. There’s lots of competition here from other local businesses but if you want to drive organic traffic to your website you can’t afford to overlook the value of SEO. With all this in mind, there are also several different SEO mistakes you’ll want to avoid.
Slow Load Speeds
People who are using the search engines to get information are used to getting their information fast. Waiting more than a few seconds for a website to load annoys them greatly. Instead of waiting they’ll choose to leave and when they do Google will receive a negative signal that will negatively impact your ranking in the SERPs. To avoid making these SEO mistakes you’ll want to make sure you have a reliable hosting plan and that your videos and images are optimized. This will help boost your conversion rate by making your website more mobile friendly.
Duplicate Content
For many years now, Google has been taking a stand against duplicate content by penalizing it. At the same time, Google will also list websites with high quality content higher in the SERPs – something that’ll also help your brand’s image. Investing in this type of content on a regular basis (content with good keywords and different meta descriptions on each page) will really give your website a boost.
Irrelevant Content
You don’t want visitors to come to your website believing you have what they need only to have to leave again because you didn’t provide them with what you said you would. When this happens, it’s known as “pogo sticking.” Since these visitors will continue looking for the information they need, they’ll go to other websites and this will negatively affect your listing in the SERPs. This is one of the easiest SEO mistakes to fix: simply be intentional about the keywords you choose to use.
Bad Links
High quality inbound links help you rank higher in the SERPs because they give your website’s authority a boost. These links come from using white hat SEO tactics like linking to valuable content – something that takes time but proves worthwhile in the end.
Broken Links
Even if every other part of your web design is perfect, this is one of those SEO mistakes that can truly affect your visitors’ experience and thus lower your SEO ranking. This is why you should never ignore broken links. Instead, make sure you’re taking steps to immediately get rid of these links. Remember, search engine bots are unable to crawl pages if they don’t exist.
Not Having a Site Map
You must create a sitemap so that Google can navigate your website and discover all your web pages. This isn’t difficult to do since there are various plugins that can be used today. Designing and submitting a sitemap to Google is particularly easy for those using WordPress.
Using the Wrong Keywords
To get your keyword strategy right you must first conduct some keyword research. This is a step that you should never skip. Instead, make sure you’re adhering to best practices here including naturally implementing your keywords so that they don’t negatively impact Google’s algorithm. It’s also a good idea to use long-tail keywords, especially when you’re attempting to rank for a highly competitive keyword. Whatever you do, one of the biggest SEO mistakes you’ll want to avoid here is keyword stuffing.
One of the best ways to avoid making any of these SEO mistakes is to hire a professional SEO company to handle your marketing for you. For this you should contact the Local SEO Tampa Company today.