Seven Reasons Your Search Engine Optimization Can Go Wrong

In digital marketing, SEO plays a crucial role in ranking websites on search engines and attracting a grander audience. If you wish to drive traffic to your website and generate revenue, you must keep yourself up-to-date with search engine algorithms. A single update in Google can affect your SEO. Thus, you should continuously update SEO strategies to be successful in the digital market.

The search algorithm of Google changes quite often, that it confuses many digital marketers. It is hard to determine which myths are doing rounds on the internet and what facts are. Subsequently, this becomes a nightmare for digital marketers since they implement useless techniques. Often, marketers waste their energy and time when their SEO goes wrong and suffer from a penalty or ban from Google.

While you may be practicing all the necessary SEO measures, you may overlook a few errors that are fatal for your brand. To be a successful SEO expert, you should be adaptable to change and improvement wherever necessary.

The best way to learn anything is to look at your competitors. Not sure who your competitors are? Try searching for your target keywords, and the top search results that show up are your main competitors. While aiming to stay ahead in the game, competitor analysis tools provide you with a platform to keep an eye on contenders’ backlinks, keywords, and rankings. This way, your company gets to gauge their target audience and market, and ultimately you can design your strategies accordingly.

If not yet, then it’s time to dig out your pitfalls while using SEO tools and techniques. Are you wondering where your SEO went wrong? Below is the list of common mistakes and their prevention strategies:

1. NOT KNOWING YOUR POTENTIAL AUDIENCE

Not having complete knowledge of the intended audience can sabotage your SEO strategies. Often people think they have a clear understanding of the audience, yet they fail to take account of the needs and requirements. Have you pondered over questions like what are people searching for these days? What are the trends in searching? While you may think your website is ready to rank on search engine results. You still need to reassess your website and think about it from the audience’s viewpoint.

How to fix it:

• Search for the appropriate market and your potential audience.
• Make use of past trends and real-time data of your audience activity.
• While getting a better understanding of your audience, you can use the People also Ask tool.

2. NOT CREATING MOBILE WEB PAGE FIRST

The advancement in this technically competent world comes with a lot of challenges. According to the mobile-viewers, the SEO techniques are not working because you may have missed the step to design a web page. If your website does not have a mobile-friendly template, loads with interruption, and fails to provide efficient services, then here is where you are wrong! In no way it implies that the search engines consider only this factor while ranking the websites. However, mobile users should be your priority since Google looks up for mobile-related searches while indexing.

How to fix it:

• Create a mobile view page of your website that gives the rapid response and complete details.
• Improve the speed of loading your mobile search results.
• Design mobile and the desktop site with a similar data framework.
• Remove all redundant links, ads, and pop-on notification.

3. CHOOSING THE WRONG KEYWORDS

The wrong keyword selection and their optimization may be one of the most common SEO mistakes. Choosing keywords that your audience isn’t searching for can be a fruitless activity. Moreover, selecting the right keywords is not enough for SEO purposes; how you use them matters most.

How to fix:

• Research different set of keywords for each page.
• Use less-competitive and relevant keywords.
• Use long-tail keywords.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.

4. COMPROMISING ON QUALITY OF CONTENT

Most search engines rank first those websites that provide appropriate information and answer searchers’ queries against the right keywords. You may have created a website, but there is no use if it lacks quality and does not meet the search purpose. Common mistakes that website builders usually make is adding up several different topics on one single page. Also, the absence of professionalism and reliable information in your content can hinder your SEO strategies.

How to fix it:

• Tailor your website content according to the ongoing trends and issues.
• Produce non-duplicate content and unique content for your website.
• Produce engaging and interactive content.

5. NEGLECTING TECHNICAL SEO OPTIMIZATION

Even if you get quality content, strong backlinks, and the best keywords — ignoring SEO’s technical aspects can result in a low ranking of your website. Optimizing the technical side of things on your website can help Google understand what your content is about for sorting operations. Title tags and meta descriptions can assist search bots in indexing your page and hence attracting customers.

How to fix:

• Keep page title tags short and unique.
• Add alt tags for image-description.
• If you are an old digital marketer, you need to level up your game by schema markup to create rich snippets.

6. POOR LINKING STRATEGY

One of the key reasons why your Search Engine Optimization can go wrong is a compromised linking strategy. Imagine a customer coming to your site only to read content with broken or irrelevant links. Do you think the potential customers may be interested in browsing your services or information in this case? Bad user experience can result in a higher bounce rate.

How to fix:

Critical tips for maintaining a strong linking strategy are:

• Manage an intact outreaching practice.
• Monitor broken links.
• Disavow insignificant links.

7. TRACING WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

Search Engine Optimization and website performance tracking go hand in hand. Many website owners ignore analyzing their website performance. It is not easy to identify which steps are good for SEO or which actions are a waste of your time and efforts.

How to fix:

Frequently tracking the performance of a website can make room for improvement. There are many online tools to measure progress. Two essential tools are:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console

CONCLUSION

Are you finding it difficult to manage SEO strategies? Is there any error causing a hindrance in driving traffic to your website? These mistakes can be one of them. Most of the website developers are unaware of the mistakes they are making. That is why they face problems when their website is not showing up on the search engine results page (SERPs). These seven mistakes can help you identify where you are wrong and how to fix these errors.