Are you optimising your website to improve ranking in search result pages? Optimising a website is a vital element of content marketing strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) is changing; however, it remains on top of the list of every marketer’s agendas since it is a powerful tool to drive people to the website and direct visitors towards the sales funnel.
Some businesses prefer to do their SEO campaign in-house while others hire SEO and web design company to assist them. Whether you optimise your website on your own or seek the service of industry experts, there are common mistakes that you should be aware of and to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Irrelevant Keywords
Producing content that is not fully related to the website’s keywords is a common pitfall in SEO. Many website owners aspire to rank for a certain keyword, but they fail to focus the content on the target topic. Now the problem is, search engines want to provide the users with the most relevant content to the search terms they use. So, if your content is not useful to the user, your website will not rank. Never try to fit different topics within a piece of content for the sake of including multiple keywords. You will end up creating low-quality content.
Furthermore, using irrelevant keywords harms the overall user experience (UX) on your website. The user journey of your website improves your SEO, conversion and overall business revenue! If you wish to learn more about using Google Analytics to track user journey, here’s an article for you to read during this circuit breaker period.
Mistake 2: Keyword Stuffing
Many are guilty of this mistake – keyword stuffing. If you think using the same keyword in every sentence of your content helps improve your ranking, you better think again. Stuffing your content with keywords will make it look spammy which in return could hurt your website’s performance. Search engines like Google will consider your content as spammy due to overusing of keywords – making it look unnatural and useless. Keyword stuffing will definitely harm your website’s ranking so do be careful of that!
Mistake #3: Wrong Keywords
Search engine optimization is all about keywords that you want your site to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). This is why it is critical to use the most relevant keywords to your website. But if you are using the wrong keywords, how would your site rank? It is essential to understand what search terms your potential customers will use when searching. The terms you want to use might mean different things to your prospects or may be too generic. So, you should be wary on what keywords to use. For example, in iClick Media’s context, the keyword ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and ‘Search Engine Optimization’ are different because of the ‘s’ and the ‘z’. They cater to British and American speaking crowd respectively.
Mistake #4: Broken Links
Wondering what broken link means? It refers to a hyperlink that doesn’t point to the intended destination. Broken links are a major nuisance to website visitors and will surely give you a bad reputation. No matter how cool your content is, if it directs to a bad link, users will exit right away. Issues like this can hurt your ranking badly. So, it is highly recommended to do regular housekeeping on your website to check for broken links. There are also many free and paid software that can do this part of the job for you.
Mistake #5: Links from Non-Credible Sources
Having links to your website is a good way to improve ranking. These links are like votes of confidence from other sites. Link building is beneficial to your ranking, but getting links from non-credible sources won’t do you any good. While it is quite difficult to get links from high authority sites, you should never substitute quantity for quality. In search engine optimization, a link from a quality site can help increase your ranking more than a hundred links from low-quality sites. We’ve another interesting article on ‘Link Building for Beginners in 2020’. Hopefully that can help you to learn more about link building in SEO work.
At the end of the day, if you still require help for your SEO, just make an appointment with our Chief Consultant here.
