4 Common SEO Mistakes You Should Be Avoiding
You’ve probably heard the term SEO at least once, even if you’re not quite sure what it means or how to do it. In a world where everything is moving online, your digital presence is more important than ever. This means you need to rid your profile of any errors. We’ve compiled some of the most common mistakes we come across with SEO and how to avoid them.
Page Speed
How often do you click off a website because it hasn’t loaded quickly enough? We certainly have. Your website’s page speed is quite essential when it comes to SEO.
Google recommends that the page load time should be under two seconds. That’s fast! You can check your speed using the Google Page Speed Insight Checker. It analyses your website’s performance and gives a list of recommendations to allow your site to load quicker. One suggestion we have is to optimise your images, so they are a smaller size. This will enable them to take less time to load, which is what Google likes.
Keywords
Of course, keywords are one of the main reasons your site appears on the Google search results page but are you using them correctly?
Picture this. You are an estate agent in Teesside and have used ‘estate agents’ as one of your keywords. Yes, you will appear in the search results, but you will probably be one in around a million different estate agents. Try and use something more specific, for example, ‘estate agents in Teesside’. We agree that this probably won’t have many hits, but the traffic coming to your site will be more valuable under this term. These keywords are called longtail and allow you to add more information for a targeted result.
Another couple of factors to consider when coming up with keywords are: slang, misspelt words, location, and the language which your audience will be using.
Meta Tags and Descriptions
Meta Data is the information that helps search engines identify the subject of your pages. This can include the title of your page and its description. Poor or missing meta data are a factor that many people forget about; however, this is crucial in providing search engines with the correct information about your site and its content.
The page title should be relevant and encourage your audience to click through to your website from the search results pages. It should include your main keywords but try not to make it too long. Keep it short, snappy and sweet. The last thing you want is to stuff those keywords in so much so that it doesn’t make sense.
The description is just as important as the title, so it shouldn’t be overlooked. Write your meta descriptions with a clear and persuasive tone to encourage users to click on your website. If you forget to write your meta description, then Google automatically generates them based on other keywords in the users’ queries. This can sometimes lead to wrong results.
For meta data to be practical, it must include: appropriate keywords, avoid duplicate information and be the correct length of words. This should be anything between 50 and 160 characters.
Links
Google will not rank your site if the user experience is poor, including how your website links together. The search engine looks for how your pages, blog posts and other content are related to one another and determines what is essential and relevant.
There are two types of links that appear on your website.
Internal links are where you take the user to another part of your website. Whether that is to your blog or from your blog to a particular product or service that you offer, they navigate the user around your website. It helps build the customer journey from start to finish. As a customer, you want to clearly find products and services, contact pages, FAQs and checkouts clearly and efficiently.
External links are sourcing your user to a site that provides more information on the topic. This should be relevant to what you are talking about and a trusted website. They help build credibility on your subject and build trust with people reaching your website, including Google. External links can also increase domain authority. This measures the backlinks to your website. The more high-quality backlinks your website receives, the higher it will rank on the search results page.
When crawling a website, Google loves to see plenty of links to decide on its ranking. We’ve spoken before about how the user experience plays a big part in increasing your SEO, and building internal and external links is part of that.
Broken links are one of the most common SEO mistakes and always make for a poor user experience.
Just think of how frustrating it is when you try to find a product on a website, and you keep being sent an error 404 code saying the link is broken. You are probably going to head to a competitor’s website, where you know it will work.
Top Tip: Avoid using URL underscores, as this can confuse Google.
So now you know what SEO mistakes you should avoid, reach out for a chat about how our SEO services can help your business.
