Avoid These Pitfalls In Your SEO Strategy

December 19, 2021
Scott Keever SEO

The online business world is very competitive and leaves no room for errors. If you have a business on the web, you need to use the best SEO strategy to stay ahead. Below are pitfalls that can break your business. Make sure that you are not guilty of any of these.

Using The Wrong Keywords In Your Website

You must take time in choosing the keywords that are the most effective for your business. When you identify some keywords, check the level of competition and evaluate how your competitors are doing with these keywords. Don’t just stop here. You should constantly check and recheck keywords to see if more effective ones come along. Keywords cost you money, so you owe it to yourself to choose wisely by taking the time to evaluate them before you invest in them. Your goal is to get keywords that will boost your site rank and optimize your bounce and conversion rates. That is the foundation of a sound SEO strategy. When you start with high-quality keywords, you give your campaign a better chance of success. In your content, you should also add latent semantic indexing, or LSI, keywords. These are words and terms that are related to your main target keyword. They add value to your content which can result in a better ranking. You can usually find LSI keywords at the end of a page of search results.

Not Using Your Site’s Tags for Title and Meta Description

Your site’s title tag is what Google displays when your site appears in search results. Using a keyword here is extremely important. Avoid using the same keyword in the titles of each of your web pages because they will end up competing against each other in ranking. Use related keywords for the title tags of your other pages.

In the search results, beneath your page’s title, is the meta description of your webpage. Google pulls out this information from your site’s code when it crawls your page, so in essence, you can enter anything here to advertise your website and invite searchers to visit. Use keywords here to boost your rank and to help Google see that you have relevant content for the search.

A Website That Is Slow In Loading

A slow-loading time is like a death sentence to a website. If your website takes a long time to load, users will leave before it completes loading because they will not wait for it. This is called a bounce rate. When Google ranks a site, it determines how often users are bounced off. A high bounce rate will hurt your ranking. In search results, Google takes into account how fast a website loads before they rank and place it in search results. If you speed up your site’s load time, you can improve your site rank.

Almost half of the web users will not wait more than two seconds for a website to load. With every additional second of wait time, the conversion rate is reduced by 7%. To translate that into numbers, for example, for a business that has a daily intake of $100,000, that amounts to a loss of $2.5 million a year just because the website loads slowly.

You can find out the load speed of your site with a tool like GT Metrix. The tool will tell you your load speed and will provide suggestions on how you can shorten the load time.

Not Using Your Site’s Analytics Data

If you are content with how your website is doing, you might think that it is unnecessary to look at your website’s analytics. Do not become complacent. When your site is doing well, you want to review the analytics to see which keywords are the best performers, where they rank, which ones generate leads, which ones result in conversions, which pages have high bounce rates, and much more. This will help you review your SEO strategy to see what is working well and what needs to be improved. When you do regular assessments like this, you will achieve your business goals faster.

Focusing on Quantity of Content Instead Of Quality

From Google’s point of view, the quantity of your content is not as important as the quality of your content. If you have 100 articles, but not one of them is relevant to what your visitors need, your visitors will bounce out, and your site will get a poor rank for the keywords that the visitors used in their search. Providing less but higher quality content is much more effective. Ideally, you should post high-quality content on a consistent basis to keep your site fresh and valuable. Just remember to focus on quality over quantity.

Omitting Alt Tags For Images

A lot of site owners forget that Google can also index images, and Google Images can help people find images on websites. This can only happen if you enter relevant terms in the image’s ALT tag.

This is something that you can easily do in WordPress. You can enter a title and a description of the image in the tag. Use keywords here so Google can count this as a relevant hit in search results. If you ignore ALT tags, and your competitors took the time to incorporate them, you will end up at the end of the pack.

Conclusion

After reading the above, ask yourself if you are guilty of any of these pitfalls. If you are, do not despair because this is the time for you to fix it. With each improvement you make, you will see a better ranking. If you don’t have the time for a website overhaul, consult with an SEO expert to do it for you. Make an appointment for a free SEO consultation. Learn where your website needs work, and see what the experts can do for you. Before you know it, you will see your website high in the ranks.