Are you attracting visitors to your website despite your digital marketing campaign? If not, there’s something seriously wrong with your strategies, particularly your search engine optimization (SEO). It is essential to do a regular SEO test or analysis to monitor the performance of your campaign.
Conducting a regular SEO assessment allows you to discover the fine points and flaws of your SEO campaign and make the necessary adjustments to optimize results. The upside is clear: with proper working SEO, you can attract valuable site traffic and potential leads. This article will discuss the common SEO mistakes you might incur, how to conduct an SEO analysis, and how to improve your SEO performance.
What Are the Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to boost your sales. Becoming updated with the latest SEO optimization strategies will maximize the performance of your website. Here are some common SEO missteps you should avoid to ensure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign:
- Practicing keyword stuffing – You might think that using your keywords a lot will boost your content’s rankings by Google and other search engines. However, it could be the opposite as too much keyword use or overstuffing will make your content spammy. If your content is labeled as spam, it will become useless and will hurt your SEO campaign.
To avoid this label, use your keywords naturally at strategic placements. The best practice is to use your keyword in the first 100 words and include latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords or variations of your main keyword throughout your content. - Posting plagiarized or non-original content – Using plagiarized or copied content on your website will make it a ‘pariah’ to search engines. Invest in producing original and valuable content to improve the performance of your website. Make sure to post relevant, informational, and error-free content to build the reputation of your site.
- Failure to invest in a mobile-friendly website – The majority of Internet users nowadays use their mobile devices to access and consume content. In the United States, 94% of people use their smartphones to search for local news or information. Your rating on search engines will be severely affected if you fail to make your website mobile-friendly. To avoid a possible drop in your ranking, test if your website is mobile-compatible.
- Using the wrong keywords – The wrong choice of keywords will leave your content at the bottom of search engine rankings. Even if your content is top-notch, if you fail to use the keywords preferred by users and search engines, it will be useless.
To make sure you are using the right keywords, use optimization tools like SEMrush, Google Trends, and Google AdWords Keyword Planner. It would be best to use different types of keywords to increase the ranking of your content. These types are broad keywords, long-tail keywords, fat head keywords, and chunky middle keywords. - Failure to use title tags, image tags, and meta-descriptions – These SEO elements are important to search engines when crawling for content. Failing to include these essential components will hurt the researchability of your content.
- Linking to low quality or unrelated internal and external links – Your use of internal and external links also affects the performance of your content’s SEO. Make sure your internal links are related to your content. Also, use reputable and well-ranking websites as external links.
- Unwillingness to leverage social influencers to share your content – When sharing your content on social media, you should consider leveraging social influencers to promote it. Having an influencer to share your content will gain instant attention, while having them to promote your content will increase its visibility to the search engines.
The many benefits of leveraging influencers to build your relationships and conduct structured outreach make this a must in your optimization plan. - Lack of SEO performance analytics and monitoring – Failure to analyze your content’s performance will leave you in the dark about how your SEO campaign performs. You may use tools like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to regularly monitor and evaluate your SEO campaign.
5 Steps in Conducting an SEO Analysis
An SEO assessment is a vital part of your SEO strategy to boost your website content’s ranking potential in search engine results pages (SERP). This process will allow you to identify what’s working and what’s causing your content’s failure to rise. Let’s discuss the steps you should take to find out your website’s flaws:
- Investigate your visibility on search engines like Google – Start your analysis by determining your content’s SERP performance and the overall visibility of your website on search engines. Having a clear view of where your website sits on the rankings will allow you to develop an optimization plan.
In calculating your search visibility, collect all the rankings of your keywords and compute the estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking. Add all the CTRs and divide the total by the number of your keywords. The higher the result, the better is your website’s position in the Google rankings. - Analyze your content – Your content is an essential component of your content marketing strategy. Make sure you have no duplicate content by eliminating every duplicate you found immediately. Start your analysis with your top ranked pages.
There are several things to check in your content. Make sure your URLs are around four to five words long, and your meta-descriptions contain your primary keyword. Ensure your titles and headings are relevant and attention-grabbing and should also contain your keyword.
Check the quality of your backlinks or external links. Try to link your content to ranking and trustworthy websites to increase your site’s reputation. Your internal links should also be relevant to your content. Make sure to fix any broken link to improve user experience and avoid its negative effects on your SEO. - Check your domain, images, and technical SEO – To improve your SEO, use a simple, short, and easy to remember domain name that reflects your brand or business. Don’t use hyphens and special characters. To optimize your images, use alt tags and include keywords in your brief descriptions. Also, compress your images for faster loading of your content.
Your technical SEO also affects the visibility of your website. Some of the technical components you should check are your XML sitemap, robots.txt file, and website security. You may buy a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to boost your security. – Read more
