Usually your first website out of the gate won’t be perfect. But, over time if you invest enough time and effort you website will start to work for you and bring in new customers without you having to actively market. The backbone to this is having an effective SEO strategy.
However, most websites and SEO strategies have leaks. In this post we’re going to examine the most common SEO mistakes that will bring down even the most well-thought out search engine optimization strategy this year.
1. Using Duplicate Or Low-Quality Content
Duplicate content can lower your value in the search engines tremendously. Duplicate content can actually confuse the search engines, and make it difficult for them to decide which page is the valuable page.
If you have duplicate content across multiple pages on your website it’s important that you use a redirect or a canonical URL, so the search engines know which piece of content is the one to rank.
A big component of what makes your website rank is having a lot of high-quality content. If you have short, low-quality content then it’s time for a content upgrade.
2. Forgetting To Do Simple Optimization
In larger-scale SEO strategies it can be easy to forget about the small details. This includes simple things like the Title Tag and the Meta Description. This also helps out your users as it will give them a preview of what your website is about.
Make sure not to overstuff your Title Tags or Meta description with keywords, but it can be helpful for your rankings to include a keyword towards the from of the Title Tag.
3. No Easy-To-Access Sitemap
Sitemaps and XML sitemaps make it easy for the search engines to crawl every page on your website. The sitemap can be seen as a roadmap of every published page and post on your website.
Sitemaps provide the search engines with a list of the pages on your website so it’s for them to be indexed, and show up in the search results.
4. Not Focusing On Mobile
Mobile is becoming a huge part of any long-term SEO strategy. In fact Google just released a new SEO update that is centered upon penalizing sites that aren’t optimized for mobile. These sites will start to get penalized the coming months.
If mobile isn’t part of your SEO strategy then you need to hop on board sooner rather than later.
Any of the above common SEO mistakes are enough to derail any high-quality search engine optimization strategy. By fixing them you’ll start to see an increase in your rankings and build a stronger long-term strategy.
If you’re interested in a high-quality search engine optimization strategy that gets you the results you’re looking for then reach out to C7 Creative today. We love serving our local clients across the Jacksonville, FL area.
by Calvin Bryant
Digital Marketing Geek
