As we enter this new year, you’ve probably thought about ways to revamp parts of your business strategies to maximize your performance in 2021.
One of your top priorities should be your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
The SEO landscape is constantly shifting as new companies and keyword competitors appear on the scene and as new strategies and policies come to light.
If you find that you can’t keep a search engine result ranking, it may mean that you’re making some SEO mistakes, which can jeopardize all your marketing efforts.
If you don’t want that to happen, make sure that you’re aware of the following SEO mistakes you should avoid this year:
Not Having an SEO Plan
No matter what your SEO experience is, take note that you can’t capitalize on information and data available online without a proper plan.
Random acts can provide you results sometimes, but they can’t be relied upon.
Create a plan and roadmap leading towards your marketing goals.
Having a strategy can play an essential role in your success and you’ll know how SEO helps your business to grow and beat your competitors.
Skipping Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Your job isn’t done once you’ve fixed your target keywords in blogs or articles – skipping title tags and meta descriptions can cause you to miss out on a lot of possible traffic to your website.
Schema is a crucial tool to tell the search engines what your website is about.
Search engines may fail to understand your content’s context if you skip descriptions and tags.
Inconsistent Link Building
When it comes to link building, consistency is the key.
Building many backlinks in a month and not generating any in the next several months will be interpreted negatively by the search engines – they could think that your content is outdated.
To ensure SEO success, your link-building activities must run for several months as you acquire backlinks actively in a natural manner that reflects how your content is suited to match a query on an ongoing basis.
Not Optimizing for Mobile
It’s may seem surprising, but many businesses have sites that still aren’t optimized for mobile devices.
If you’re one of them, your business is missing out on potential sales and leads.
Many web users browse the internet with their mobile devices, meaning that a significant percentage of your web traffic could be coming from mobile users.
Nowadays, it’s easier and more efficient to make a website that’s designed responsively.
A responsive design, it enables you to design not just a single version of your website, but the design will adjust itself automatically in response to the detected screen size.
A responsive website is also one way to ensure that your website will look its best on every device possible.
Additionally, search engines prioritize websites that are mobile-optimized in their rankings.
Not Internally Linking
To make your content discoverable by search engines, internal linking is fundamental.
It’s also good for sending leads down the funnel so they can easily access the pages you want them to.
Without an internal linking structure, you’re limiting the SEO power distributed across your domain.
A great way to determine internal linking opportunities is to search on Google using your keyword to see if you’ve mentioned it on other pages.
Focus on Search Functions and Structured Data
Structured data will set you apart from the usual crowd.
Using it will make your website rank higher and make the results appear magnified in contrast to some listings.
There are different types of structured data for several categories of content that may be applied to your website.
For example, you can consider a FAQ section, Events, and How-To section.
You should focus on improving your website’s internal search features.
Your website users must experience convenience when searching for relevant information, and you can help this direction via the search feature.
Make an effort to integrate a search feature into your portal and optimize your listings so your users can find exactly what they’re searching for.
Not Performing Keyword Research
Keyword research is important if you want to grow your site through organic search traffic.
If you won’t do keyword research before writing your blog post, how can you determine if anybody’s actually looking for the topic you’re writing about?
You can do everything else perfectly, but if you don’t perform keyword research to establish that there’s sufficient search volume, you might be wasting your time.
You may get a higher rank for search terms, but if nobody uses that search terms, then you won’t get any organic traffic.
Another mistake that bloggers make in keyword research is targeting competitive search terms.
When looking for your preferred keywords, ensure that you do a Google search on such terms and check your potential competitors.
If your competitors are big and powerful entities, it’s worth choosing less competitive keywords.
Focusing on only one keyword is another mistake that most people make when it comes to keyword research.
While it’s great to have focus keywords that you optimize for, you must also optimize your blog posts for synonyms of the keywords.
Any blog post should rank for multiple search terms.
If you don’t know how to get started with keyword research, there are some tools you can use. You can also hire professionals to do the job for you.
Poor Website Maintenance
Another major SEO mistake is poor website maintenance.
Google rewards websites that are well-maintained, so not maintaining your website may lead to your website slipping down in the rankings.
An area of website maintenance that you must focus on is broken links.
Broken links happen if you have links on your blog that send your reader to 404 error pages.
It could be an error on your website or on an external website you link to.
Being riddled with broken links is a sign of poor maintenance and may cause your blog to slip down in the search engine rankings.
So, make sure to fix any broken links in your website and do regular maintenance for better SEO performance.
Conclusion
SEO will continue to develop over time, but it’s crucial to avoid such SEO mistakes that may cost your website its traffic, leads, and rankings.
What you learn from mistakes and taking the initiative to introduce positive change can ensure your success in this field.
I’m a tech enthusiast, entrepreneur, digital marketer and professional blogger equipped with skills in Digital Marketing, SEO, SEM, SMM, and lead generation. My objective is to simplify technology for you through detailed guides and reviews. I discovered WordPress while setting up my first business site and instantly became enamored. When not crafting websites, making content, or helping clients enhance their online ventures, I usually take care of my health and spend time with family, and explore the world. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or read my complete biography.