Every business wants to increase the amount of traffic coming into their site - and you probably have a variety of ways that you’re doing this, but are these the most effective? You may be making search engine marketing mistakes without even realizing it.
Faulty Keyword Research
Most search engine traffic is coming in from well-optimized keywords attached to appropriate keyword research. If your keywords are wrong, you’re either missing out on some of the best traffic…or attracting the wrong buyers.
Overusing One Keyword
There’s likely several keywords that you could use on every single page of your website - or at least few. But stop the presses - you don’t want to do that! If you’re optimizing several pages for the same keyword, how does Google know which one is most important? It’ll be up to them to guess - and they may guess wrong. Try to choose a different keyword for each site page if possible, and limit repeats!
Forgetting That Speed Matters
It’s easy to forget, but site speed is an important part of SEO and search engine marketing. Search engines officially count speed as part of a ranking factor, and it’s hard to tell whether that can do or more less damage than the people who run the other way. A two second delay is enough to cause people to abandon your website - or their purchase.
Neglecting Image Optimization
Those pesky images need optimization too? Yes! Start with image names - search engines crawl through titles, and associated code. Don’t forget alt tags and title tags - this is code that can prove both useful for visitors to the site, and will be crawled by search engines. As above, size still matters! Image size can affect site speed time, linking these two closely.
Multiple H1s on a Page
Your H1 should be your top header. Like keywords for a page, the headers are telling visitors and search engines what they should be paying attention to. If there are multiple H1 tags, yet again the search engine has a harder time deciding what is important.
SEO Or User Experience?
For years companies have been focused on driving SEO - without thinking about it how affects the user experience. Users don’t like it - and the search engines have picked up on it. While you want your SEO to be strong, you also want your website to be attractive, easy to navigate, and clear to read.
Unclear or Too Long Meta Descriptions
While Google may not use meta descriptions as part of site ranking anymore, this is still a valuable part of search engine marketing. Your meta description is a large part of what attracts people to your page; it’s your opportunity to convince people to click that link. Meta descriptions should be different for each page, clearly explaining the benefit of visiting that page, and around 155 characters.
Have you been making any of these seven mistakes in your search engine marketing strategy? If you have, take a deep breath. Each one of these is fixable - and those fixes can go along to improving your traffic amounts, and your site’s ranking in searches!
