Here are some common SEO mistakes with tips on how to avoid them.
Mistake 1: Not Knowing Your Audience
One of the fundamental principles of SEO is to understand your target audience. That means knowing your audience at the most minute and granular level. SEO is the customer’s voice. While many marketers think they know their audience, they often fall into the trap of not understanding how consumers behave in their market and then at a granular level. At the same time, as consumers expect instant responses and results to their queries. They often want this in real-time. While historical data still gives SEO great insights into seasonal trends, marketers’ methods to understand their customers have to be holistic. One of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords is neglecting the preference of search engines and users for long-tail keywords. While you might define your products and services in a certain way, it’s more important to understand what words your potential customers would use to refer to them.
Tips:
- Look to understand the market in which your consumers buy – what are the macro trends?
- Utilize both historical and real-time data to understand how behavior is changing.
- Map what you find about consumer intent to your keyword selections and strategy.
- Utilize Google keyword planning tools and vendor tools at your disposal.
Mistake 2: Not Having an SEO Plan & Roadmap
There is no point knowing all about your audience and then taking little or random action on maximizing opportunity from that knowledge. Many organizations struggle to either build or execute on strategy from large enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses. Last year only 36% of small businesses had an SEO strategy. Building an SEO strategy and roadmap is critical for success. However, many plans fail as building a sustainable and efficient strategy relies on multiple stakeholders – website, PR, content, product, IT, and engineering. There is also the issue of ensuring that any strategy has executive buy-in and internally understand the importance of SEO, and are trained on SEO best practices.
If you don’t have a roadmap – a blueprint for your success – you need to build one now. Look at where your site and results are now and where you want it to be. Set goals and agree on workflows.
Tips:
- Evaluate and understand your competition – rankings, keywords, content, and performance.
- Break down actions in tasks and agree on goals and key stakeholders.
- Agree on roles for content, site updates, digital alignment, and SEO evangelism.
- Look for technologies – tools and platforms that will help with workflow and your strategy.
Mistake 3: Creating the Wrong Type of Content
Another common pitfall in SEO is producing content that is not actually about your audience. The problem is that you want to rank for a particular keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your target topic. Search engines like Google want to serve their users with the most relevant content for their search terms. Thus, if your content does not answer user needs, it won’t rank well.
This mistake is often a result of:
- Trying to fit a few different topics within a single piece of content.
- Creating low-quality work just for the sake of including keywords.
- Optimizing for multiple keywords in one article.
Your primary goal should be to produce content that genuinely corresponds to the questions and needs of your target audience, including using the right search terms.
Then search engines will be able to trace your content as matching the keyword you are optimizing for.
Marketers can make two big mistakes with content:
- They are not focusing on content for the right audience.
- Not producing content that is based on expertise, authoritative, and is trustworthy.
Hence it’s vital to create content that Google wants.
Tips:
- Ensure content and SEO strategies are tightly aligned – per your SEO strategy and roadmap.
- Make sure your content answers the questions people are searching for.
- Create multiple types of content for different needs and SERP layouts – video, visuals, text.
- Follow Google’s best practices on search quality and E-A-T.
Who is Visitivity Inc.?
What sets us apart is our unique ability to help our clients clearly visualize and articulate the communications they need to get out to their audience and customers. As a business owner you know it is easy to work in your business and not always on your business. Ensuring your branding, your positioning, and your communications impacts your audience and is effective takes a team. We have developed great trust with our clients in being able to help them address their overall marketing and thus create effective and purposeful content that makes a difference for their business and is a true representation of their commitment to what they provide their clients or customers.
We created Visitivity to take care of customers and communicate with them in a no nonsense, straightforward language that they can easily understand. We take this level of trust with our clients very seriously. It pains us when we hear people say, “I wasted time and money and didn’t get what I wanted from this other company”. Educating our customers is paramount to their success and our success.
Contact us at 239-878-4641 today for a free consultation or quote. We look forward to working with you.
— Donna and Jeff Clapp
Your Visionary Partners
Visitivity Inc.
