5 Silly SEO Mistakes that Pull Back Digital Marketing Success

SEO adds immense value to the success of digital marketing, user experience, and builds trust and credibility. When you’re following the best SEO practices, you’re doing justice to your website as well as the audience that’s on the hunt for the right information. Search engine algorithms keep changing, but the very basic SEO principles always stay intact.

We’d all agree in unison that using black hat SEO techniques is the king of blunders, but what about other silly mistakes?

You’d easily come across the best SEO practices that can help you a great deal. However, the job becomes smoother when someone tells you about the most common SEO mistakes that you have to dodge.

If you have not been ranking well, here’s a list of 5 common SEO mistakes that you must be making without even realizing.

1. You don’t have a link building strategy

Every SEO expert out there emphasizes that building links is imperative to get higher ranks.

However, it only makes sense when you’re doing it the right way. Some people have been misled thinking that making as many links in a short span can help boost ranks. If you’re under this perception, then you’re making a mistake. Link building mistakes can backfire.

First of all, you have to understand that quality is way more important than quantity while building links.

Getting a single link from a high authority website is better than getting ten links from average ones. Now that you know to what extent quality matters, you still have to stick to an optimum number of links- not too many, and not too less. Study your competitors to see how many links you can create and get so that you’re not penalized.

When you’re creating back-links, don’t use the same anchor text repeatedly. This seems unnatural and gives Google a good reason not to rank you. It’s simple- if you’re using the same anchor text without putting much thought into it, you will lose credibility.

2. You’re not thinking about your audience

It’s good to aim for better sales, revenue, and overall profit. However, if you’re churning out content or marketing products and services without providing value to your audience or customers, your success won’t last long.

Many business owners make this brutal mistake of not considering their audience, and this makes it better for your competitors.

When you’re writing content, be an audience first. See if you would want to read it. What earns you genuine points is how long your audience stays on the page. If your content is mostly placing keywords here and there, being repetitive, outdated, or barely has any information, then you can’t make your audience stay. Once you start writing for the benefit of your audience, you can always add appropriate keywords, links, and do what’s needed to make it rank better.

3. You’re not updating the existing content

Hundreds of websites come up with content similar to yours every day. You must’ve written a blog that ranked well and had a lot of traffic. However, over time, other websites will start to rank better if you don’t update your content.

The mistake you’ve been making is- counting on content that has been there for a while without making the needed changes.

Google has high regards for content that’s fresh and updated. If you’ve written a blog that reads as “Top 5 digital marketing tips for 2017,” it’s quite apparent that the blog holds no significance presently and is outdated.

Updating your blogs doesn’t mean deleting everything that’s there and starting anew. You have to make changes so that the content is relevant to the current time. For “top 5 digital marketing tips for 2017,” you can change the year to 2019, and add some new tips. Google gets an indication that you have updated the blog for the audience and ranks your content better for being fresh and informative.

4. You’re not focusing on title tags and meta descriptions

To most people, title tags and meta descriptions look more like fillers. If you use them the right way, they can help in improving your rank significantly.

You can think of these factors as attractive packaging for a product. The product can be super useful, but what attracts people and encourages them to buy it to a certain extent is the packaging.

When people come across your page in the search results, they first read the title to see how relevant the content is to their search term, and if your page would be better than the other results.

Meta description also gives them an insight into your content and what they can expect. So, if frame an enticing title and meta description that summarizes your content well, you can expect more clicks.

When using title tags, bring diversity in the headings. Use the H1 tag only once in your content since it denotes the heading of the content.

Use various headings and subheadings with the help of H2, H3, and H4 tags. You can also include bullet points and numberings. All these practices add a semantic structure to your content, making it more readable and appealing to the audience.

5. You’re not researching and using keywords the right way

Relying on the focus keyword all the time is not the best practice. You have to use alternate keywords that many people use in the form of a search query.

These keywords are called LSI keywords, which are more like phrases. This helps you keep your keywords diverse without using one keyword over and over.

When you use a tool to find the best set of keywords in your niche, don’t just go by the search volume.

While search volume is a crucial factor to consider, you also have to make sure the keywords you choose are relevant to your niche. If not, using high search volume keywords won’t make sense.

It’s also essential to select keywords that have a high search volume and at the same time are low or mid-range in competition. This means ranking for such keywords without having to outdo too many competitors becomes easier.

Now that you know the type of keywords you should pick, it is also important to know where all you can use the keywords.

When you miss the prime spots, you’re lowering the chance of ranking better. Use your focus keyword once in the main title of your content, and try to use it once in one of the headings if it seems grammatically coherent.

Besides this, you can use the focus and LSI keywords in the following places throughout the content.

• Meta Description
• Subheadings
• Content
• Images
• Anchor text
• URLs
• Social Media

SEO does seem complicated and intimidating, especially to beginners. With the ever-changing algorithms, it also becomes difficult to keep track of what needs to be done to be in the good books of Google.

However, the few SEO factors and mistakes that we’ve discussed have been constant over the years. There have been many updates, and you can still hope for better results if you correct these 5 SEO mistakes.