This post is a follow up of my SEO Series, In case you haven’t checked the first part, please click here. This article is about the SEO mistakes you may need to avoid at all costs.
Without a doubt, Search Engine Optimization is one of the core part of your online marketing strategy, it’s importance is rising specially with the passage of time, when more and more people are using Search Engine’s to find Information.
Just to Add : For those who don’t know about SEO, Wikipedia Says :
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine‘s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.”
SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2024
- Importance of SEO.
- Reason For Writing This Article.
- 8 Core SEO Mistakes to be avoided!
- Conclusion and Your Thoughts!
If you have a content that delivers quality, information or if you are a service provider (doctor, engineer, lawyer, plumber, electrician or anyone) and deliver what people like or if you are a manufacturer, product maker or a distributor or anyone and you are not focusing on generating visitors to your website from Search Engines, you are losing enough.
Do you know that majority of the website traffic is derived from Search Engines?
Google & other search engines are the major source of traffic for majority of the websites serving online. All this leads to clear fact that a number of million people use search engines to find relevant information.
Reason For Writing This Article?
With more and more people coming up with their own SEO myth’s, I thought to mention some mistakes which every blogger & webmaster should avoid on. These are the few simple yet effective advices which i have learned over time and thought to share it. In anyway, you can disagree with me or have your opinion but do check them.
8 Mistakes You are Making with Your SEO Strategy :
Focusing Search Engines Alone:
This is the biggest mistake I see people doing and its due to the SEO boom and articles people see on how they big players are making money through search engine traffic. I know the importance of Search engine traffic but if you are writing articles for just search engines then let me tell you that you are not going to survive longer.. why? because you forgot your eventual visitors and they are human beings.. not search engines. My theory is that make your visitors happy and search engine will always be happy with you.
User Experience Isn’t a Priority For You
It’s 2016 and you still don’t know the value of Good user experience on your website? Companies are now spending more and more on website user experience because they are spending huge money on traffic acquisition and they plan to take the maximum out of it.
When You Link User Experience with your SEO Strategy, then it’s a win-win. There are few things you can consider to improve the user experience of your website.
- It’s all start with Observing visitors on how do they Interact with Your Website/Service/Product.
- Implementing a Responsive Design with a good layout/website structure.
- Working on improving the website loading times, optimising images, css and other files.
- Linking it with Social Platforms.
- Track and Test to See what is working for you.
Moreover, If your website do not have different variations for Desktop, Mobile, Tablet and other devices, you need to work on it to improve the user experience, not only it will help in improving SERP’s on Search engines but it will also help in gaining more visitors and converting them into readers.
Unique vs Quality Content :
So you are done with the keyword research of your website and started writing unique articles either by yourself or by hiring a writer but do you think just having a unique content is enough? You must be thinking that Google analyses site quality based on the uniqueness of content but you are completely wrong with it. Google want to entertain it’s audience, visitors and every person who have trusted Google to find something useful in accordance with what he was searching.
So what Google is exactly looking from your site? Unique content? naah..!
They say content is unique, some say visitors are king, but if u don’t have a good content, who will read it?
Do people visit your website just to see a unique article having a same concept? they don’t want to see what’s written elsewhere, they want to know your opinion, your take, your point of view on that particular subject!!! Even more, Most sites do not retain ranking or having hard time to rank is because their content do not deserved to be rank on no.1 position, so even if you get to spot.1 you are not going to stay there for long time.
Google is looking for Quality Information and content which no one has produced over the internet. There is no harm in taking information from other articles (make sure to give credits to them) but what matters is you provide such quality information such as your own analysis, your own opinion, your own thought, which is not available over Internet, trust me Google is going to love you and your site rankings is going to be a long term one.
You are very greedy at external linking to authority sites in ur topic.
I remember the day when i was submitting thesis (a kind of research book) to my university. While I was reviewing it for the final time before submission, I saw a lot of references, citations and links even when the topic was my favourite and it was totally unique.
I learned that day, the more references, citations and links you add, your content becomes more authoritative, powerful and acceptable. Actually you can’t write on anything without learning about it, even you can’t have your own opinion unless you see what people say on that topic. Actually that’s how humans learn. The same theories applies with Search Engine rankings. Link to relevant and useful sites in your industry and Google is going to reward you.
Suggested Reading => 5 Reasons You Should Link Out to Others From Your Website by Rand Fishkin.
You are building BackLinks only:
Excess of anything is bad, same goes with backlinks, I know they matter a lot in Search Engine Rankings.. but if you are working too much in just building backlinks only and doing nothing more, then you are doing it wrong. What I suggest alternatively is that you need to work on improving your marketing strategy, you need to be better at building relationships with your audience, write such content that grabs attention and people love to share and in no time you will start getting automatic backlinks.
Social Sharing is a myth in rankings.
If You still do not think that Social Sharing plays an important role in SERP’s then you are completely wrong. Dario at SearchEngineLand has discussed How Social Signals Affect Your SEO?. It’s because Google is now more concerned with what people are thinking and discussing the most, the reason why Google gave so much importance to backlinks was that they find out with the help of backlinks on what people are discussing about however the trend seems to be changing. Social Sharing is a new ranking factor that google considers in ranking of the websites.
Various case studies have also shown that the affect may fluctuate based on the number of likes, votes, attention or shares the post/links get over social media.
Even more, I know ample of people who are able to rank websites on easy to medium keywords just by having social signals and no backlinks at all.
You are Not Inter-Linking Enough :
Many of my old articles still receive good amount of traffic and it’s because i have been doing inter linking time by time. It takes ample of hard work and deep research to write one single quality, so why waste the effort? Just remember when doing inter linking, not to over do anything. Erik has posted a wonderful guide on how to increase traffic through Inter linking, which is a must read!
You focus visitors but not relations! [Big SEO Mistake]
I know having a good amount of visitors coming to your site is important and there a number of ways you can get traffic because that’s how you make money online, but is this everything?. Okay let me explain you in another way.
Let’s say you receive 10 visitors from search engine daily so you get 300 visitors a month from search engines, right? but let me tell you a different story. Let’s say you change your focus from generating visitors to building relationships.
There are many ways on how you can effectively convert website visitors but let’s see another calculation.
You generate 10 visitors a day from search engine and you try to build relationship with them through different ways then what happens? You make 10 new loyal readers. So you made 300 visitors a loyal one. Now you got 600 visitors a month, 300 from search engines and last 300 month organic visitors which you have converted into permanent readers. Now just multiply it over months and see how your traffic goes..
So focus on building relations with your audience, because ‘Visitor’s Die and Relationships don’t, so build relationships, not visitors.’
Conclusion on SEO mistakes to avoid:
So you learned that having an online search presence is very important for your business. I also have tried to discuss various SEO mistakes which i have seen most of bloggers and webmasters doing it. You can consider all of them as a’No go’ area.
I also feel that one of the mistake people don’t realise is that they often over estimate their own self and forget the competition and new entrants in the market. SEMRush can help you in it. Check my detailed tutorial and guide on Semrush.
What Are Your Thoughts and Opinion? Which Mistakes caused your S.E. downfall? Which Mistakes Taught You a Lesson? Obviously You can have a different opinion than me and you are welcome to write it.
Stay tuned for the next part!