This Search Engine Journal report indicates that a whopping 75 percent of users never really go past the first search engine results page. A huge percentage of these people will only click the first three results on the first SERP, if not just the one at the very top position.
This tendency of click through rates to reduce as you move down the search engine results page makes search engine optimization, or SEO,ever more important.
With countless businesses competing for the same coveted position at the top of Google’s SERPs, SEO can be quite a demanding task. Unfortunately, your SEO efforts sometimes won’t yield the results you desire.
Read along to find out five main mistakes on your website that could hurt your SEO strategy.
5. Building your SEO strategy around the wrong keywords
If SEO was an engine, keywords would be the vital cog without which the engine would not run.
Choose the wrong cog, and the whole engine is damaged. It’s like signing the wrong check. That’s precisely what happens to your SEO strategy if you choose the wrong keywords to target.
Targeting the wrong keyword is something that happens all the time. It’s easy: you just need to skip keyword research and create a list of keywords based upon your company’s internal marketing initiatives instead.
While this is not entirely off the mark,chances are that you will miss out on what customers might be searching for exactly.
Eventually, the whole strategy will be grounded on mere intuition rather than real data from actual research.
The danger of this approach? It creates a strategy that lacks inexternal perspective. Such SEO drives only a limited niche traffic leaving out millions of people who are searching for the same product using a different term.
Keyword research is vital. It reveals and helps you interpret what your target customers are looking for at different times.
That’s why you should start with it at the time you’re building your website and continue conducting it throughout your marketing lifecycle. It’s actually like an entry level exam that continues like a CAT throughout the lifecycle of the website.
Testing your keywords as you go will help you identifythe keywords that need to change to make your campaign more effective.
Targeting the right keywords at all times can help drive the right audiencesto your website.
To conduct an effectivekeyword research, consider using industry leading keyword tools like Ahrefs to identify the right keywords, check their effectiveness, assess their levels of competition and test them before building your entire SEO strategy around them.
4. Producing thin, poor quality or short content
While the ideal length of content remains debatable, a large body of research has revealed a strong correlation between greaterlengths of content and higher positions on SERPs.
Apparently, long form content tends to rank better on search engine results pages compared to shorter content.
While there is no fixed rule to explain this state of affairs, we know that longer content allows for in-depth coverage of a topic.
Google has rolled out a series or updates over the recent years that increasingly make content quality a major ranking factor. And longer content is likely to carry more information about a topic, making it more topically relevant and useful to the searcher.
The tech giant introduced Google Panda algorithm update in February 2011, which lowers the rankings of websites with low-quality or thin content. It also increases rankings for websiteswith relevant and high-quality content.
This is why creating short pieces orpoor-quality content can hurt your rankings and deliver poor results despite your commitment to search engine optimization.
It is also best to consider enriching your content with images and other media such as video and infographics to boost your rankings.
3. Stuffingyour website with keywords
Even though we have emphasized the importance of keywords in any SEO strategy, it is important to use keywords sparingly in both your webpages and blog posts.
Stuffing your website with keywords can hurt rather than help your SEO efforts. Google defines keyword stuffing as the practice of packing your webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate your site’s ranking in search results.
You’ll notice that the exact-match target keyword “custom cigar humidors” has appeared so many times that it spoils the quality of the content.
For one, using exact-match keywords like that is especially a bad idea since Google’s semantic search following its Hummingbird algorithm update of 2013 means that the search engine will look for the meaning of a user’s search query, and not just read the keywords per se.
Second, your readers will frown at those annoying keywords and probably swear to never return to your site. Googleon the other handwill frown upon your content and punish you for the bad experience.
2. Having a slow website
Your website might have great content and great use of the keyword you target to rank for, but if your site doesn’t render within 2 seconds, you are likely to lose a huge lot of traffic and Google will effectively lower your rankings.
Having a slow website equals having a low domain authority.This is in part because many users will bounce off your site. Google on its part will interpret the high bounce rate as the lack of value.
Google has also made it clear that it considers page load times when qualifying which content to display on itssearch results.
Every second counts. Be sure to test your site’s loading speeds and improve it accordingly forbetter SEO results.
1. Inappropriate internal linking
Internal linking is a key part of on-page SEO, but you have to implement it correctly to serve its purpose – keeping visitors within your site for longer.
Loading your content with too many links, or with links that are downright irrelevant can significantly hurt your SEO.
To implement internal links, ensure that you choose anchor texts that actually correspond to the topic of the page that the link is pointing to.
Every link is supposed to take visitors to other parts of your site where they can get more information (or something they need). The idea is to make every link useful to the visitor, and they will be glad to click your links and stay on your site.
Wrap up
Bad SEO or the website mistakes such as discussed here can significantly hurt your results. On the brighter side, each mistake is avoidable, so make sure to watch out for any bad SEO practices that may be hampering your site from realizing its full SEO potential.
