Achieving a high ranking in search is essential for the success of your business. No matter the nature of your business, having a website with a high amount of traffic is crucial. If your competitors are ranking higher than you in search results, it means that you’ll be losing valuable customers to them.
This is why you need to get your SEO right. SEO is a bit of an art form though, as there are multiple things that you need to keep an eye on to improve your performance. So if you’re not sure why you aren’t getting the search results that you’re after, we’re here to help.
Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes businesses make, and how to fix them.
Keywords play an important role in search. They help the search algorithm to determine how relevant your content is to a respective query and allow you to reach people who are looking for your products and services. The problem that many businesses have is that they only compete to rank with popular keywords.
If you’re an industry leader or have a massive marketing budget, this won’t be an issue for you. However, for example, if you’re a plumber in London, you probably won’t be the only business competing for ‘plumber in London’ in search.
Whilst it’s still good to appear for these words, they alone won’t deliver the results that you need. Try to find more unique keywords that have less competition and incorporate some long-tail keywords if possible. In essence, the more specific the keywords are, the higher you’ll be able to rank for them. Things like location and specific services are a great way to boost your ranking and get more traffic to your website.
On the topic of keywords, this is another common error. Keywords are proof that you can have too much of a good thing. If you have too many keywords in your web content, it can cause a number of problems.
Firstly, keywords are designed to be read by a computer, not people. This means that some keywords don’t quite reflect human language. Too many of these in a single piece of content can cause it to read less like someone wrote it and more like it was churned out by a computer for optimum results.
Secondly, if your content reads in this way, search engines will read this like a computer wrote it and push it down search results – regardless of the keywords.
The trick is to incorporate keywords into your content in an organic way so that search algorithms will rank your site and humans can read it.
In today’s world of instant notifications and next day delivery, consumers expect speed. If your page takes a while to load, two things will happen; visitors will likely leave your page out of frustration and search engines will push you lower on search results.
This means that you need to constantly review your site to ensure that it’s loading quickly. A great place to start is with your visual content such as images and videos. If you’ve splashed out on crisp video and high-quality images, this could be harming the loading speed of your site. See if you resize or alter this content to help your website load quicker.
Other areas you can consider are website features – do you need every carousel and design feature that your host offers? Do you really need every plugin running at once? Having a lot of these features running can gum up the works of your website and slow its loading speed.
Security is a priority for everyone, and this is reflected in search results. If a search engine identifies that your site isn’t secure, you won’t rank well in results. Today, search engines and consumers alike are looking for SSL certification, This means you will have https:// at the start of your URL and a small lock icon in the search bar of browsers.
Having this certification shows both search engines and visitors alike that your site is trustworthy, and allows them to visit your site with confidence. If you don’t have this certification, this will harm your search rankings and traffic as well.
Errors and bugs are other problems that search engines can detect and will lower your ranking if they find them. Commonly overlooked errors include broken links and pages that don’t load or only partially load.
So, make regular maintenance of your site a priority and you may see better returns from your SEO efforts.
Today people don’t just use computers to access the internet. They use their tablets, phones, TVs, and even smart devices such as Alexa and Google Home devices. This means that you need to consider these mediums when creating your content because if you don’t, you’ll be reducing the number of incoming visitors.
When creating your website, make sure that it is mobile friendly at the absolute minimum. Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to take further steps such as optimising for voice search, and other devices.
Finally, you need to update your content regularly. Websites with less activity (be it incoming traffic or new content) are deemed less desirable in the eyes of search engines as they aim to deliver the best results possible for a given query.
Make updating your content regularly a priority. How you go about this is up to you, but if you’re short on ideas a blog is a great place to start. This will allow you to post new content regularly to keep or increase your SEO rankings.
Nailing your SEO can feel like you’re taking aim at a moving target. Implementing all of these tips, however, can help you to get more consistent, if not better, SEO results. To see how we could help you with market acceleration, get in touch with Zudu.
