In order to have a successful SEO campaign you’re going to need to have an effective, well thought out strategy. Only when your SEO is done correctly will you start to see results in the search engines. However, since local SEO is fairly complex there are a lot of things you can get wrong. Here are five SEO Mistakes to avoid.
In this post we’re going to cover five of the most common mistakes that a lot of local business owners make, that are killing their SEO results. Best of all, a lot of these mistakes can be fixed fairly quickly.
1. Stuffing Your Copy With Keywords
Website owners used to be able to get away with stuffing their copy and content full of relevant content they wanted to rank for. This worked in the past, but today this will only slap your site with a penalty.
You should use relevant keywords within each page on your website. However, you should avoid using that same keyword repeatedly. The recommended keyword density for your target keyword should be around 1-2%.
2. Old and Outdated Content
Google loves fresh content. If you’re not regularly updating your blog, then your website isn’t in line with Google’ freshness indicator. This is a part of their algorithm that values websites that post on a regular basis.
It’s important to create evergreen content, which will be useful for years to come. But, you should also blend this with a regular posting schedule to create a steady stream of content.
3. Not Letting The Google Bots Crawl Your Site
Web crawlers or Google bots are how Google knows what pages to index in the search engines. They gather information about your website, so they’ll know what keywords to rank your website for.
However, the web crawlers only can access the pages you enable them to access. The way they crawl your website is via internal links.
To make your site easier to crawl you should include an XML sitemap, which will enable them to more easily crawl your website. Along with improving your internal linking structure, as mentioned below.
4. Having Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can hurt your rankings, because they’re trying to provide the most relevant results to searches, which means not displaying your content twice. To fix duplicate content the best course of action is to simply remove it from your website.
You can also re-write duplicate content so it’s entirely unique. But often, it’s a better process just to start from scratch.
5. Forgetting To Include Internal Links
Internal links help your SEO efforts and make it easy for your website visitors to navigate your website. They help to showcase the page hearty on your website, and illustrate to the search engines which pages are the most important.
Internal links go from page to page on your website. Make sure the internal links you’re adding are relevant, and make it easier to navigate within your website.
If your business requires an SEO strategy that actually works, then get in touch with C7 Creative today. We love to create custom SEO strategies that help businesses in the local Jacksonville, Fl community succeed.
