When you’re first starting out with digital marketing and SEO, it can be easy to make mistakes. The internet is a vast and ever-changing landscape that offers new challenges every day. Luckily for businesses who are just getting their toes wet with SEO, there are some common pitfalls that nearly every marketer makes at some point in their career. Once you know what these mistakes are, recognizing them when you see them becomes easier. With that in mind, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes businesses make right now:
Focusing too much on keywords and SEO at the expense of other marketing tactics.
Keywords are important. When you’re choosing a target audience for your content and website, you need to consider the words that people use to search for businesses like yours. If you’re not careful, you may focus too much on keywords at the expense of other marketing tactics. For example, if you’re writing an article for your blog about how to improve website usability, you may decide to stick a list of usability guidelines at the top of your article. While this may be important for SEO, it may also come across as spammy. If you want to succeed online, you need to be able to stand out without feeling like you’re spamming your audience.
Competing against your own products and services.
If you run a website that offers both digital marketing services and e-commerce, you may inadvertently end up harming the success of your digital marketing services by promoting your e-commerce products too heavily. If you do a Google search for “marketing services” and “marketing agencies,” you’ll see a lot of results for companies that offer both marketing services and e-commerce. While it’s great to have a presence in both spaces, you may end up cannibalizing your other services by promoting your e-commerce sales too heavily. If you’re promoting your digital marketing services and e-commerce at the same time, you need to make sure that you’re not accidentally turning potential clients away from your services. If you see that your digital marketing services are being outshined by your e-commerce products, you need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy and marketing tactics to ensure that your services don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Only focusing on the search results that directly lead to your website.
While you should definitely focus on getting your website to rank high in Google search results, you also need to make sure that you’re focusing on organic search results as well as paid search results. Organic search results are the results that appear when people search for your business and services directly on Google. Paid search results, on the other hand, appear when people use Google’s paid search ads. If you’re only focusing on the organic results and you don’t see any paid results for your website, you may not be focusing enough attention on reaching your audience where they are most likely to engage with you.
Forgetting to make the user experience enjoyable.
When you’re creating content, it can be easy to get caught up in SEO and forget that the reader is also important. The reader needs to be able to understand your content and use it to achieve their goals. This means that you need to make your content as user-friendly as possible. At the same time, you also need to make sure that your content is search engine friendly. You can do this by including relevant keywords and avoiding certain elements that can slow down a reader’s ability to find what they’re looking for.
Not providing value for your target audience (or paying attention to value for your target audience).
Finally, you also need to make sure that you’re providing real value for your target audience. If you’re writing blog posts or creating content for your website, you need to ask yourself, “does this help my audience?” If you’re trying to rank for a certain keyword, you also need to ask yourself, “does this help me rank for that keyword?” If your content is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to rank for a particular term, you’re likely to see a decrease in engagement. When you’re creating content, you need to make sure that you’re not only creating content that’s SEO friendly, but that it also helps your audience achieve their goals.
Conclusion
The internet is a vast and ever-changing landscape that offers new challenges every day. While SEO can be challenging, it’s also an incredibly rewarding career that many people are fortunate enough to pursue. If you’re new to SEO, it can be easy to make common mistakes. Knowing what these mistakes are and recognizing them when you see them can help you avoid making them in the future. With that in mind, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes businesses make right now.