SEO is a detail-oriented practice with plenty of “do’s” and “don’ts” and this is particularly true if you are new to SEO. Even SEO veterans can make mistakes because SEO is always changing, and it means you must be on top of the latest changes while keeping up with the best practices. This can be particularly challenging if you are trying to build a new business. Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes:

1. Putting too Much Focus on Traffic

Getting more traffic to your website is only one aspect of SEO, but so many people think that it should be the focus, particularly with business and marketing.Part of SEO is designed to promote your website, and have it show up in the SERPs for the keywords that you want to rank for. The other part of SEO is the experience that your users have when they visit your site. You do not need thousands of visitors to your site, only engaged ones who will become converted to customers. Content marketing offers users information that they will find helpful including answers to common questions and issues that arise in your niche. Lastly, social medial provides the personality for your online business. Always plan to create content that is interesting and engaging to your target audience.

You need to closely examine your site and consider ideas that you have not tried in the past. This will mainly involve you having to take some risks with your site and try new things. The starting point is to audit your site and ensure that you are focusing on unique keywords with low competition. You will want to identify links that are dead that were built up over time. Every page should have a call to action to encourage conversions. Once you have taken care of that you can create new pages to target new keywords, then create and set up your profiles on social media sites including LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Instagram. Do not forget to sign up for Google+ Business so that your page will appear in Google Maps for local search results. This process is certainly time-consuming, but it is worthwhile once you invest the time and create the page correctly.

2. Gaps in Content and Keywords

If you have gaps in your content strategies and keywords, then you are not access all the marketing opportunities available to you on the web. Gaps are keywords being targeted by your competition and not by you, which puts you at a disadvantage with ranking.The more time that passes without you trying to fill in the gaps, the more ground your competition gains by building more authority over your site. If your competitors are ranking well for a valuable keyword and are also running paid ads, you will be hard pressed to compete for visibility and rank. How can you fill in your keyword and content gaps if you do not know what is missing? If you want to find out what the gaps are in your content, services such as SpyFu and SEMrush can give you valuable insight into your competition and what they are doing. You can use Ahrefs and Moz’s Open Site Explorer to get insight into your competitors’ pages that have a lot of backlinks to them. This can give you come good ideas for content, but never directly steal from your competition. You can use their successful content to gain inspiration for your content but make it your own and never duplicate.

3. Not Consistently Formatting URLs

Links are powerful, whether you are linking to a page on your site or someone is linking to you via a backlink, the search engines use links to discover and investigate your site.You want search engines to have the correct information pertaining to your site and that is why it is important to ensure your links are correctly formatted. If you have inconsistent URLs the search engines can become confused and it will be difficult for your site to rank for your target keywords. When you decide on the method you want to use to format your URLs, it is important to stay with that system. They key is to be consistent and know that there is no advantage to any format, only that they should all be the same format.

4. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can cause a lot of issues when search engines find the same thing on different pages. It becomes harder for Google to differentiate pages and this means it will not know which of those pages it should recommend to users of Google. If you find yourself copy and pasting content instead of taking the time to write something unique, you are creating problems that can become quite serious. If Google cannot determine which page to recommend because of duplicate content, there is a good chance that neither page will be recommended. This means that all the work that you have put into your page will be for nothing because you attempted to save some time by copying and pasting content. The duplicate pages will have to be completely changed before they can be crawled and ranked by Google. You can fix this issue by deleting one of the two duplicate pages or you can rewrite one page to change the direction of it. Choose one of these solutions and take care of your page because not doing something will mean that neither page ranks.

5. Poor Content

Poor content is brief, does not provide any type of meaningful answer or is oversimplified. This type of content offers a very poor user experience and with many industries working hard to increase both the quality and the length of their content, “thin” content is not going to do much for your site. What it will do is reduce your site’s rank or remove it from the SERPs altogether. Google wants you to be successful, but if your content is not good or helpful, it can show that you do not really care to try and be worthy. If you want to rank well you must produce content that is useful, well-written and helpful. Start by researching the best keywords for your industry and writing about those keywords in detail. Publish your content regularly to start to rank for your targeted keywords in Google and promote that content using social media with hashtags in your posts to make it easy for your target audience to find it. Always include a call to action near the end of your content, that is your “take” after you “give” a good read to your audience. You might think that giving valuable information away for free without getting a return is crazy but the pay off is big. You will become an authority in your niche by helping people and being active online. This is how you lay the foundation to build a solid reputation online.

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Good SEO is important and taking shortcuts can cause serious damage to your online reputation. Take the time to do the work correctly from the start and invest in your business day by day. The payoffs will be great once you put the work into your site.

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