Competition to capture your audience’s attention has become increasingly difficult these days with so much content being created, published and promoted every second. Hence, quality and strategic SEO has probably never been more important for helping you be the best answer whenever and wherever your audience is searching.
Below we will look into some of the most common SEO mistakes to avoid, for the betterment of the content marketing strategy for your website.
• Selecting the wrong keywords – A very common SEO mistake is selecting the wrong keywords. Everybody wants to promote their products and services in certain ways, which is why it is extremely important to understand what words your potential clients would type to get their preferred ones. So to avoid such jargons, you should be careful not to choose the wrong keywords on your web page or blogs. Taking help from some powerful tools like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, and Google trends is always beneficial.
• Using keyword stuffing — Keyword stuffing is when a brand fills a webpage with the same target term to rank higher in search engines. Keyword stuffing is widely condemned by search engines. You could be hit with a Google penalty that removes your page from search engines pages altogether.
• Focusing on quantity over quality – With contents being published every second, it sure is difficult to cope with others, but that does not imply that publishing content every second guarantee hopeful results. Your content should hold quality piece that helps your audience.
• Publishing duplicate content – Duplicating content can lead to a loss in traffic at your website and being penalized by Google. This leads to the downgrading of your website. Therefore instead of copying from other places or using software that spins the content into a new shape, you should invest your time in creating original and useful content. This is the only way to make sure your website does not get downgraded and pushed in the back of search results.
• Not having unique title tags and meta descriptions – Having company or website name as the title for every page throughout a website is a big mistake. Having a unique title for every page is very necessary, and not just for SEO purposes. Descriptive and unique titles are highly important because your page titles are usually shared in tweets and used as the text when someone bookmarks your website.
• Not using anchor text for internal links – One of the most important components of SEO is an anchor text. Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your post and pages best when they are linked to from somewhere on the web. Another benefit of using anchor text for internal links is that it connects your content and gives Google an idea of the structure of your website. A hierarchy is then established on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable pages. Therefore using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO.
• Only focusing on on-site SEO – Optimising your website is a major component to ranking but you cannot overlook off-site strategies. All businesses must create engaging content for other websites. To maintain and attract traffic at your website you need to allocate some time every month to having content placed on other websites. The content has to be keyword rich and has links pointing to your website.
- Not using the power of influencers for social media interactions – Getting the attention of users who have significant online influence is one of the main goals when sharing your content on social media. This means your content gets noticed by both your target audience and by search engines. That’s why it is important to create relationships with such ‘power users’ and to use their credibility to promote your content. It’s much easier to make noise about your content when the user sharing it has credibility on networks such as Digg, Reddit, or Quora. An indispensable part of your optimization strategy is building relationships and doing structured outreach via influencer.
- Creating content unrelated to your keywords – Another major mistake in SEO is creating content that is not about your keywords. In the next step you want to rank for a certain keyword but you fail to focus the text on your target topic. Search engines like Google want to serve their users with the most relevant content for people’s search terms. Thus, your website won’t rank well if your content does not answer user needs.
- Neglecting dated content – You have probably created a ton of content in the last couple years that you haven’t touched since it first published.
But you could be leaving opportunity if you’re not regularly looking for ways to refresh it and keep it relevant for searchers. To continue or improve ranking momentum you can look into your analytics to find your top and worst performing pages and blog posts, paying special attention to evergreen topics.
Today, an indispensable part of any content marketing strategy is search engine optimization. Even though you can find plenty of advice online, making several typical SEO mistakes is quite common. Instead, it’s better to get well aware of the challenges that others have experienced and avoid them in your marketing efforts. The above-given errors have proven quite widespread, so they are now easier to recognize before you make them.
