Now that the New Year has come and gone, you’ve done your rituals and set down your business goals. This time add one more thing to your list – 10 of the most common SEO mistakes you must avoid in 2018.
SEO is undoubtedly one of the best methods of attracting organic traffic to your site. You had better be prepared with a checklist of SEO mistakes that you’ll need to avoid in the coming year.
Why SEO mistakes? Because everyone will talk about the things that will help you grow. But no one will talk about the bloopers and blunders that hold you back. So here we are to get you out of a pothole even before you fall in it.
Here’s your checklist for attracting organic traffic through Search Engine Optimization.
1. Having no Keyword Strategy
It’s the first thing you do when making a marketing strategy. It’s impossible to imagine a successful SEO strategy without a keyword strategy.
Whatever plan or campaign you create, keyword strategy will always remain at the heart of it. Without relevant keywords, you can’t even create a simple article for a blog.
All your efforts are futile, if you do not have an incredible keyword strategy or a strategy at all.
If you are new to this, you might need some help and a lot of practice to develop a remarkable keyword strategy that gets more organic traffic in just a few months.
2. SEO Mistakes: Excessive Keyword Optimization
More is not always merrier. Keywords are optimized to maintain a good spread across whole content.
Too much optimization will lower the quality of the content which will have harmful effect on your ranking and traffic. It also messes up the flow and readability of the content.
You might think of this as an age old practise where people used too many keywords and managed to get better results. Believe me you; it doesn’t work that way now.
3. Optimising Irrelevant Keywords
An irrelevant keyword is like the bad fruit in a basket. It is pointless to treasure or nurture it. It can fail your keyword strategy and eventually harm your campaigns.
A potent keyword strategy is the root of a great campaign and of greater returns. It will help you get better leads, more organic traffic, relevant visitors, good engagement, and conversions.
This New Year go back to your keyword strategy and stop putting that extra effort on irrelevant keywords. Use Google’s keyword planner to develop a new on and get ready to achieve higher returns.
4. Plagiarism
Duplicate content is arrested by Google immediately. It frowns upon directly copied content.
It can also penalise you for doing that and when that happens, no one will be able to get you out of that pothole. It’s scary to even think about it, right?
There are plenty of tools these days that give a plagiarism check for your content. You can use one of those and make sure, your content is not copied or same content does not exist already even if it is by chance.
5. Faulty Link Building
Google is very cunning when it comes to link building. You try to buy links, work through link baits, or any other default practices, you will be penalised.
These faulty links are of low quality and it reflects on our links profile. These are all websites with low quality labelled for spam links and shady private blog networks.
The further away you stay from them, the better it is for you. Earn your links by adopting ways that are ethical and acceptable by Google’s guidelines.
You can do guest posts, third party posting, competitor’s link building etc. to gain high value links. Try those and let us know how well they worked for you.
6. Irregular Website Update
Updating your website content is big time profitable. Visitors want to see new and updated content every time they visit.
They want to consume relevant fresh content and not out-dated boring content when they come back to your site.
Search engines crawl on the sites and check for new high quality content. It helps draw attention and improve your organic traffic along with your ranking on the search engine results pages.
7. Having no Knowledge About Search Engine Updates
However broad your marketing strategy is, you should always keep yourself informed about the updates, trends and latest changes about the platforms being used.
Knowing the latest updates will help you be up to date with your activities and not lose out on any kind of profitability, be it rankings, traffic or organic search.
8. Absence of Image Optimization
8. Absence of Image OptimizationThere are very high chances of driving traffic from Google Image Results. Thus, you need to keep all the images on your site optimized for good.
Most of us ignore this wondering how big a difference is it going to create.
But you don’t know you might be up for losing a great deal of valuable customers if you don’t do it. Do you want to face that risk?
9. Inconstant Speed Checking
Sometimes unknowingly the speed of the website shoots down. With multiple changes in the website content, you might not realize how the speed got so low.
Take a few minutes every now and then to check if your website is running on at the right speed. We all know this that most visitors are lost because the website refuses to load on time.
So better keep a check on that this year. You can check your site speed on Google PageSpeed Insights.
10. Not Optimized for Mobile
We are in the period where mobile is taking over everything. 70% of users browse the internet using their mobile phones. It is lethal to ignore this device.
It is a pain to browse a non-mobile friendly website on the phone. Don’t leave your visitors in pain.
Now Google too has realised how grave a problem this is, thus it has started ranking low the websites that are not optimized for mobile.
Let’s take a look at the mobile marketing trends for 2018
Hoping this piece helps you avoid the most common SEO mistakes and puts your best foot forward. 🙂
