SEO Strategy: Don’t Let These 8 Mistakes Derail You

SEO Strategy: Don’t Let These 8 Mistakes Derail You

SEO is the unicorn of the marketing world: get it wrong and miss out on the magic, but if you get it right it can totally change the way your business rakes in revenue. Marketers often drive themselves crazy with disappointment when, after spending what seems like endless time, a lot of money and way too many resources, SERPs improve by very negligible amounts – or not at all.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the act of sacrificing content quality for the sake of including all of your target exact-match keywords. While the most obvious effect is unnatural language in your content, Google is also penalizing you via lower website rankings. Avoid it all costs.

2. Ignoring Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

The best way to approach SEO is to relate to your audience’s search habits. When you do a Google or Bing search, which results are you most likely to click? Probably the ones most related to your query.

3. Slow Website

Your website is the billboard for your company, so to speak. Use tools such as tools.pingdom.com/ or developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to check for common errors such as server response time and large/unoptimized images.

4. Ignoring Website Analytics

When it comes to SEO strategy, when it is performing well you should be working on keeping up the pace and monitoring for any changes. Should those changes happen, and things start to fall apart, analytics need to become top priority. Tools like Google Analytics and products like Bridgeline Unbound Insights are great resources for measuring website visitors’ behaviors, where your website’s traffic comes from (acquisition), how well it ranks in search engines and even how leads are converting.

5. Ignoring Content Quality

Quality versus quantity – which is more important when it comes to SEO? The honest answer is both, but with a slight preference towards quality. Posting a smaller amount of high-quality content will never hurt your rankings even though it may not necessarily (quickly) improve them. Conversely, producing a lot of low-quality content will severely hurt your rankings.

6. Using free or cheap website hosting

While it may seem like the smarter decision, limiting your investment on website hosting services can hurt your domain’s authority. This comes down to the fact IP addresses associated with websites hosted freely or cheaply are often lumped together with hundreds (and, in some cases, even thousands) of other domains by the website host. Thus, these other websites are now influencing your SEO. This is definitely an area where you want to spend a little more money.

7. Not using alt tags for images

We all know about the “images” tab on Google. When someone searches through images using a specific keyword – and if your images are properly optimized with alt text using those same keywords – Google will rank the images from your site higher. If the searcher uses your image, they’re likely to link back to your site, and voila – more traffic!

8. Letting broken links live

It happens to the best of us – writing more content often includes more backlinks which can break over time. These broken links now create a broken link to your content, and too many instances of this will lead Google to “think” your website is not updated and rank it lower. Be sure to check for broken links often and remove or redirect them as is appropriate.

How will you doctor up your SEO strategy? Let us know in the comments, or enlist some backup from our SEO specialists by requesting a free SEO audit today!