Meta-description: Great SEO practices start by avoiding bad habits of the past. Eliminate these ineffective practices by learning the most toxic approaches.
Online marketing can be a challenging job, especially if you’re new to SEO (search engine optimization). You may feel intimidated at the sheer volume of methods you have to learn. As SEO involves various components, using all of them at once can backfire. Besides, if you keep using methods that worked in 2009, you’re at risk of getting your website penalized.
Every business owner wants to succeed in promoting their brand. In today’s online marketplace, this can be tough. Promoting your business means you have to generate traffic to your website. SEO is a great way to generate massive amounts of traffic. Once you get to the top three search results, you get over 50% of the traffic. You want any possible advantage to rank high.
Still, there are various SEO mistakes that can negatively affect your ranking. Boost your conversion rate and maintain your ranking, make sure to avoid these bad habits:
Lack of Social Media Presence
How often do you promote your business through social media? 93% of customers expect businesses to have a social media presence. Social media platforms like Facebook are a gateway for people to connect with each other. Your potential customers are human beings craving for real connections, and that’s what makes social media popular. Oftentimes, most marketers dismiss social media from a corporate
perspective. A single like and retweet don’t seem particularly valuable. However, a flood of likes on a post can provide invaluable free publicity.
Not maintaining your social media presence can be a deathbed for a new business. There are over 2.27 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide. Social media is a must if you want to increase your online presence. All social media channels are also a stage for thousands of influencers. Your business should be there.
How to improve your social media presence:
- Choose a social media platform that suits your business. A place where your target market and potential clients hang out.
- Schedule posts and maintain your active status on social media. Use tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer to save time. Tools allow you to track your networks and respond to messages immediately.
- Determine the type of content you’ll be sharing based on your target audience. Examine them with the help of demographics. Remember that your visual content must be of high quality and relevant to your niche.
Keyword Stuffing
Keywords have always been an important part of SEO. Search engine crawlers use them to analyze a site and understand its content. If you want to get more leads, increasing your content’s keyword density can result in more traffic. This method is called “keyword stuffing”, manipulating a page’s ranking on SERP. However, this can backfire, getting your website penalized by Google.
Most people choose to skip the keyword research process and choose easier paths like keyword stuffing. However, using a single phrase 500 times does not lead to any profitable results. No one wants to find a website that only reads “baby clothes on sale” repeated 1,000 times.
The constant Google algorithm changes have filtered out all the keyword-stuffed pages. It’s important to differentiate keyword stuffing from general keyword usage. Keywords are still a key factor for your ranking. Don’t let Google will ban my site for all eternity if I use keyword stuffing, scare you from using the right keyword strategy. Like a healthy diet, you need to do work in moderation.
How to insert keywords responsibly:
- Use long-tail keywords – Instead of using “best SEO services” a hundred times, use a variety of long-tail keywords to spice up your content and hit the right amount of keyword density.
- Implement synonyms – Homonyms are words with two different meanings. Google has a database index called “Google synonyms” that can recognize homonyms like “pen” a writing instrument from “pen” a holding area. For this reason, Google knows if your website is talking about writing and not about animals. Implementing a variety of related words means your site has crafted content rather than meaningless spam to trick search engines.
- Use keyword research tools – Try using various keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Shitter, and MOZ tools. These tools help you identify which keywords have the potential to increase traffic to your website. You’ll know what your target audience searches for.
Poor Site Speed
Does your website load fast? Akamai’s research shows that a one-second delay in a website’s load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. A website’s speed affects the user experience. No one wants a slow loading site that takes forever to load. It also prevents search engines from crawling pages using their allocated crawl budget. As a result, your site or pages might not get indexed. Pay attention to your website speed since it’s a part of Google’s ranking algorithm. The faster your website loads, the better signal you receive from Google. This will have an impact on your overall bounce rates and conversion rates.
Ways to fix a slow loading website:
- Enable cache – When you visit a site, some elements are stored in a cache. Turning on caching improves your site’s loading speed. The next time visitors check your website, they can access those parts and load much quicker.
- Optimize and reduce the size of images – Oversized images can negatively affect your website since it requires the browser to load bigger files. If the width of your blog page is 853px, then make sure that’s the width of your image.
- Remove resource-hogging plugins – If your site has too many plugins, you’re only slowing down its loading speed and making security risks. Too many add-ons can become resource hogs. Get a baseline test of your loading speed through Google Pagespeed Insights. Go to your plugin list then deactivate one add-on at a time.
- Minimize your code – When you focus on customization using CMS or a website builder, your website’s code can get messy. There’s a possibility of line breaks, spaces, and other broken features. Be sure to minify your CSS and Javascript files. Save your files in one place instead of different files to improve your site speed.
Not Analyzing Your Strategy
It’s not a secret that working smart can lead your business to success. To understand if your SEO campaign is working, you need to consistently analyze and measure your SEO performance. On top of being a complex field, SEO has many strategies like link building, content optimization, social media management, and much more. One thing you can do is hire an SEO professional to help manage your campaigns. It’s ideal to start your SEO campaigns with an evaluation. An internet marketing expert in Waterloo like Local SEO Search can determine SEO mistakes and implement immediate solutions. They’ll make the necessary marketing changes and observe the results again.
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If you’ve noticed a positive ranking performance to one of your strategies, focus on that single method and improve it as much as you can. Remember to analyze, optimize and scale. Without these important methods, your SEO strategy can become unstable and random.
Steps to measure the success of your SEO campaign:
- Check your keyword rankings – Constantly checking your keyword rankings helps you identify if your traffic is declining. For instance, if your rankings drop over a period of time, you might be using the wrong set of keywords. You need to know which keywords are working for you.
- Check your conversion rates – Tracking your conversion rates help you know how many visitors have completed your call-to-action. It also determines how many people have purchased your goods and/or services. A higher conversion rate indicates that your current strategy is working.
- Check your backlinks – Backlinks are an important ranking factor. Having a large number of links from authority sites can help you get the edge over your competitors. However, low-quality links can hurt your site’s reputation. The main point is to keep links that are helpful for your site and get rid of all those that aren’t.
Remember to build your website with customers in mind. Then, start optimizing it to search engines. You must understand how SEO works. Acknowledging your mistakes and implementing new solutions can improve your Global SEO marketing strategy.
As the year 2019 starts, give yourself an edge over your competition. Start by addressing simple errors and paying attention to improving your site’s SEO. Search engines focus on giving users a better experience. Avoid cheap bulk link building services that are too good to be true. Make sure your website is properly managed by a professional. Only choose experts that deliver customized campaigns without hurting your rankings.
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