As an internet marketing technique, search engine optimization plays an important role in the growth of your online business. Not only does it help search engine robots to accurately index your web pages, but it also helps enhance user experience. Moreover, as a long-term marketing strategy, SEO can help drive organic traffic and steadily boost your site’s ranking in SERPs.
Implementation of SEO, however, can be a challenge for newbie marketers. This is because SEO comprises of a wide range of on-page and off-page SEO factors. If you are unaware of what these are, you are bound to make silly SEO mistakes. This, in turn, can severely affect your site’s ranking as well as traffic and conversion.
If you have noticed a sudden drop in your ranking and traffic, then one of the reasons for it could be one or more of these SEO mistakes. Let’s take a look at a few of the SEO mistakes that you need to fix right now.
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Poor website speed is one of the major SEO mistakes that leads to a high bounce rate. In this fast-paced world, no one waits around if a website doesn’t load in seconds. This means that if your website loading speed is sluggish, it could hamper your site’s performance.
Checking your site speed on GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights can help you determine the reasons for slow website speed. These tools will also provide suggestions on how to fix these issues effectively, helping to reduce bounce rate and rankings.
404 errors and broken links are another reason for a high bounce rate. Broken links on your website affect not only user experience but it also makes indexing of the website harder for search engines. Finding and fixing broken links on your website is essential when it comes to improving traffic and ranking.
Long gone are the days when you could randomly stuff keywords into your articles in an attempt to rank highly in search results. Today, Google’s algorithm has become much smarter and any keyword stuffing or over-optimization of target keywords could lead to a penalty. This, in turn, could affect your brand’s credibility.
One of the best ways to avoid this is to use LSI keywords and search terms. This will enable you to add varying keywords similar to your target keyword. Plus, it will help improve readers experience, which could help boosts your rankings.
The importance of high-quality content and content length for SEO has been broadly discussed time and again. This is because they are both important factors and failing to ensure the quality and optimal length of your content can have negative repercussions.
If you're not writing informative content that is beneficial for your target audience and of high quality, then you need to rectify this immediately. Creating new content and updating existing articles could really help improve your SEO.
Google has long since announced that mobile-friendly websites are mandatory. As such, if you have still not made the switch, then you are losing out on potential traffic, which could affect your ROI. Mobile-first indexing also means that not having a responsive website could also affect your site’s rankings.
As mentioned above, SEO is vital for the success of your online business. Implementing best SEO practices and avoiding common SEO mistakes is important to drive traffic and improve ranking.
While above are some of the SEO errors you need to avoid, here is an infographic from hostingclues.com that highlights all of the SEO mistakes you could be making and that you should address as quickly as possible.
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