15 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid
Understanding SEO is the ultimate marketing discipline, especially in today's highly digital world. If you want to drive traffic to your site and increase sales, you have to keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithms.
Here are 15 common mistakes to avoid.
1. Ignoring Your 'Google My Business' Listing
One critical SEO error is not claiming or properly managing Google My Business listings. With Google continuing to place importance on “near me” searches, the single biggest opportunity for small businesses is to claim their location, provide all info and answer questions that come in. - Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding
2. Only Focusing On On-Site SEO
Most businesses still believe that SEO is just done on-site. Optimizing your website is a major component to ranking but you cannot overlook off-site strategies. It is essential that all businesses create engaging content for other websites. You need to allocate some time every month to having content placed on other websites that is keyword rich and has links pointing to your website. - Scott Darrohn, fishbat Media, LLC.
3. Overlooking Page Titles And Meta Descriptions
Too many times, I see websites with "Home" as the page title. Fixing your page titles and adding meta descriptions are such an easy thing to correct and so important to SEO. Most website CMS systems have the ability to change this by default but are normally overlooked when a small business owner is building their own website. - Thomas Brodbeck, Site Strategics
4. Not Running Regular Website Audits
An audit reviews your website's performance from the client's point of view and from the view of a search engine. Is site navigation user-friendly? Is relevant information easy to find? How quickly does the mobile version launch? Careful examination reveals ways to improve the site. An audit looks at search engine optimization, loading speed, the checkout process, content quality and so much more. - Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing
5. Leaving Old URL Structures In Place When Redesigning A Site
A common mistake that has a huge impact on SEO comes from revamping a website without redirecting traffic from old URLs to new ones. We use a 301 map that maps old URLs to new URLs. Then, we set up redirects in a staging environment, pre-launch. If you change the URL of a highly trafficked page, Google won't know where to send that web searcher and you will lose that SEO traffic. - Ben LeDonni, CreativeMMS
6. Placing Important Text In Images Rather Than On The Page
It is easy to make something look nice in an image instead of actually coding the effects around the text. The problem here is that search algorithms look for text and can't read the text inside images. Content is king, and you need to have words on your page to get indexed. - Omar Jenblat, BusySeed
