Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Here are a Few Common Mistakes That Can Cause Your SEO To Take A Hit

Review your website and adjust as necessary so that your target audience can find you easily!

1) Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the process of filling content with keywords in an artificial or unnatural way.

For example, hiding extra variations of keywords in text that visitors won’t see or shoving certain phrases in even when they make no grammatical sense.

This SEO mistake is usually brought about by the idea that Google ranks pages higher if they frequently mention a keyword, assuming that any page where that keyword is mentioned a lot must be relevant.

That was true once upon a time… but the days of that are long past, and keyword stuffing is no longer a good way of getting pages to rank well. In fact, it’s more likely to drop your results instead of raising them.

Instead of stuffing them into the content, just try to work them into the material in a sensible and natural way. Don’t worry about meeting an arbitrary number of uses – just focus on creating the best content you can.

I’ve always found that having a good subject to talk about makes it easier to focus on creating quality content instead of artificially trying to improve your SEO results.

For additional help with this, check out our examples of valuable content for inspiration for engaging content that connects with your target audience, and our B2B content marketing tips to learn how to tie all these elements together for a more impactful and effective marketing program.

2) Creating Duplicate Content

Search engines prefer fresh, original content on websites. If you duplicate too much content on your site, it will eventually hurt your ability to be found.

Copying content from other sites should be avoided as well.

If you want to share great content and promote another business, that is fine. Stick with a short quote, or paraphrase, and then link to the site to which you are referring. Bonus: linking to other sites within your own is great for SEO!

Here is a helpful introduction to SEO for business owners and marketers.

3) Not Using Analytics

Some of the companies I’ve talked to think it’s fine to simply make blogs, buy ads, and wait for visitors to come – usually because they’ve seen at least a little success by doing so.

That said, if you’re not using analytics, then you’re not really doing SEO.

The real strength of this type of marketing is the way it allows you to find out what’s working and what isn’t, then refine your future marketing decisions based on what you learn. For example, if you see that ‘news’ style articles are particularly effective at bringing in customers, then you can start writing more of those and fewer articles of other types.

A true marketing strategy is about more than trying to make a profit – it’s about setting your business up for long-term success.

Analytics gives you an incredible amount of information, but it’s up to you to use that information and make it the foundation of your success. And if you aren’t, someone else will – count on it.

Have a solid blog template is important- check out our blogging template for Easy SEO.

Would you like to get an idea of the SEO health of your site, then we have the tool for you. Use the form below to receive a Free SEO Audit of your site in your email. If you know you have issues and would like to speak with us about our SEO services please contact us HERE.

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Cheers,
Jeff