When it comes to making your website stand out, you have some competition to deal with. In fact, you are competing with 1.7 billion other websites.
So how can you stand out? One way is through your marketing efforts and the types of SEO you are using.
But digital marketing has become so cutthroat that you must become highly intuitive and always a step ahead of the game. It doesn’t help that the industry evolves rapidly. Changes are upon every digital marketer, like a clingy child, constantly. And even with the best intentions, you’re bound to make mistakes.
But if you make SEO mistakes, your competition is going to beat you. Here’s how to avoid those mistakes.
Forgetting Your Audience
If you do not have a target audience, then you are making one of the biggest SEO mistakes.
The first thing you have to do when creating a website is to make sure you have the target audience down. Ask yourself:
- Who am I targeting?
- What are the demographics of the people I am targeting like age, location, sex, gender, race, etc.?
- What does my target audience like to do, and what are their hobbies?
You need to understand what your target audience is doing to understand how to stay up with the trends.
Publishing Non-Original Content
If you are too focused on getting content out there and basically doing what other blogs and businesses are doing, you are not going to stand out. Google will not choose to rank your site above the rest.
To have Google help you rank higher, you need to make sure that you are going with more innovative marketing techniques and making your content stand out among the rest.
If you want to discuss how to eat healthily but there are already a ton of blogs out there, come at it from a different angle. Perspective is everything.
Leaving Out Links
When writing blog posts or content on your website, you must include quality links. This means you should be internally backlinking to your own site (to bring people back to your own content) as well as linking to authority external sites.
The links must be relevant, recent, and have a solid reputation. That means if you are linking to your own website 7 times in a 500-word post, you may be overdoing it, which can be worse than leaving them out in the first place.
Forgetting Keywords
One of the most important ways to rank higher on Google and other search engines is to make sure you are using relevant keywords.
For instance, if your blog is about SEO, you most likely want to include the word “SEO” in your blog post as well as other longer-tail keywords that have to do with SEO, like search engine optimization, marketing techniques, and others.
This will help to increase your domain rankings.
Ignoring Mobile Optimization
Almost half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it affects your search engine rankings.
For one, if yours isn’t optimized for mobile, users may not be able to read some relevant details as your website’s content layout doesn’t fit smaller screen sizes, driving away visitors.
In addition, you’re making a costly mistake if you ignore mobile optimization because Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly and prefers to prioritize those that are, as they follow a mobile-first indexing algorithm. Worse, you might not appear on its search pages.
Not Taking Backlinks Seriously
Backlinks are an indication of a website’s relevance and authority. Consider them a vote of confidence from search engines. But you’ll be making a costly mistake if you get links from low-quality websites. It might make your website less trustworthy and credible.
Hence, it’s best to seek the assistance of backlinking experts with long-standing relationships with credible publishers and high-authority sites. There are many great SEO companies in Cincinnati and other places. You may reach out to them if you want success in this field.
Don’t Make These SEO Mistakes
If you want your website to stand out among the billions of other websites in the world, you need to make sure you are avoiding these SEO mistakes.
With these tips, your website will be ranking higher on Google and you’ll see your marketing efforts pay off.