The acronym ‘SEO’ was first used in 1997. It doesn’t matter what website you have or what service you offer; optimizing it for search engines is a must if you want to draw organic traffic to your site.
However, with SEO playing such an important role in getting more views, there are some SEO mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to be successful.
It isn’t enough to just be familiar with SEO best practices. You need to stay on top of the newest musts and mistakes when it comes to SEO. Because SEO is constantly evolving. And so what worked last year might be an SEO mistake this year.
If you want to stay on top of your game, you need to constantly be doing SEO research. And I’m here to help you to better understand this research as well as SEO mistakes you should be avoiding.
As you might know, I am a bestselling personal development author with about 2 million books sold globally.
Plus I created a program to help entrepreneurs to make money online.
It’s called Make Profitable Courses Without The Overwhelm.
I love sharing insights and strategies to empower entrepreneurs and businesses to be more successful. (I even offer private business consulting!)
So, keep reading to find out more about the most common SEO mistakes and what you need to do to fix them. (I also wrote an article with 44 Free SEO Tools you might want to check out after you’re done reading this article!)
4 Big SEO Mistakes to Avoid
1. Not Doing Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Simply creating content that is in line with your brand isn’t good enough; if nobody is searching for the topic, then it won’t be seen. To gain organic traffic, you need to be creating content people are interested in.
Keyword research is the easiest way to ensure the topic of your content is relevant. If you can figure out what people are typing into search engines, then you can tailor your content to match these searches.
If you’re unsure how your website is ranking compared to your competition, and if keywords really make a difference, you can go check out this rank checker now!
2. Not Matching Search Intent
Once you’ve done your keyword research and created your content, you need to make sure it’s relevant to the query. Google tries to show users the most relevant results for their query, so if you want to boost your SEO, you need your content to line up with search intent.
While doing your keyword research, you found out what people are searching for, but now you need to find out why they are searching for it. For example, if the search is related to “best electric kettles,” the results will most likely be blog posts talking about the topic. People searching this wants to compare different items, so an e-commerce store is less likely to feature than a blog post.
To avoid not matching the search intent, you need to analyze the content type, content format, and content angle that performs best with these searches.
Content type usually falls into one of five categories:
- blog post
- product
- category
- landing page
- video
Content format applies to:
- blog posts
- listicles
- news articles
- opinion pieces
- reviews
Whereas the content angle refers to the main “selling point” of the content you’re creating.
Once you’ve analyzed the top results and how that content is created, you’ll have a better idea of how to shape your own content to better match the search intent.
3. Not Building Backlinks
Links are a crucial factor in Google rankings. So if you’re using the right keywords and you’re matching the search intent but still aren’t ranking as high as you want, you simply might not have enough links.
Building backlinks is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. Link Reclamation can help you with this.
Link Reclamation is simply the process of converting mentions into backlinks. The process is pretty easy, so there’s no reason to ignore this. Not doing this can also cause you to lose out on more authoritative backlinks that could take you a lot of time and energy to get otherwise.
The first step in link reclamation is to find mentions of your brand that don’t link to your site. There are various tools that can help you find these mentions, or you could use Google Alerts to find unlinked mentions. You can also set up an alert to let you know the next time someone mentions your brand.
Once you’ve found unlinked mentions, you’ll need to reach out to the content owner to ask them to add the link. You need to remain respectful as you want to keep this relationship. You can also set up bulk outreach emails to request content owners to add the link to your mentions.
4. Underestimating Title Tags
Title tags are a goldmine when it comes to boosting your SEO.
After your content, your title tags are the most important on-page ranking factor. Title tags are meant to give a user a brief look at the content of a result and why it is relevant to them. Title tags are usually the deciding factor when it comes to actually click on a result.
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your title tags, you’ll want to:
- keep the title tags brief but compelling
- add keywords
- avoid clickbait
- avoid vague titles
Easily Avoid SEO Mistakes
Understanding the possible SEO mistakes that you could be making and how to avoid them is a step in the right direction. You not only need to know what you have to do to garner organic traffic, but you also need to be aware of what could be hindering your progress. So take a look at how you’re approaching SEO and see if you’re making any of these mistakes.
If you enjoyed this article about SEO mistakes and how to avoid them, go take a look at my blog for more engaging content.
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