Search engines are one of the predominant methods consumers use to find products and services. 40,000 Google searches are made every second. That translates to 3.5 billion searches in a single day. Search engines are amazing tools that can be used to find exactly what consumers want.
Despite the power of search engines, many businesses still struggle to appear in search results relevant to their products or industry. This can be extremely frustrating. It can also have a devastating effect on your bottom line if you use your website to sell your products or services.
What you may not know is that you could be making a common SEO mistake. SEO, of course, stands for search engine optimization and is the strategy website owners use to get their websites ranked in search results. Below are a few rookie SEO mistakes you should be sure to avoid.
Accidentally Cannibalizing Your Keywords
One mistake many newcomers make is creating on-page keyword cannibalization. This occurs when multiple pages on a website are optimized for the same keyword. This can cause issues for Google’s algorithm.
First, you could be punished by the algorithm for “keyword stuffing.” Second, Google won’t necessarily be able to tell which page you want ranked the highest for that keyword. The website that is ranked may be one you didn’t actually intend to focus on. To avoid cannibalizing your keywords, you must vary the keywords used on different pages and use inserted links pointing back to the page you want ranked when you do use it on other pages.
Not Localizing Your SEO
One of the focuses of your search engine optimization efforts should be localization. Localization refers to the strategy of targeting a specific geographic location. If you have brick and mortar locations, localization is absolutely vital to the success of your online marketing.
Think, for example, if you only focused on keyword terms like “pizza parlor” for you pizza delivery business in Toledo. In all likelihood, the actual search term Toledo citizens would use to find a pizza place that delivers is “Toledo pizza delivery.” Your business may get lost in the shuffle entirely as a result. 50 percent of people who make a search with local intent visit a store within 24 hours.
Not Analyzing Your Traffic
Analytics is an extremely important part of SEO. Without it, there’s no way to gauge how successful your efforts have been. If you keep a tab on your traffic using a tool like Google analytics, you’ll be able to find out exactly how many people from where are using what keywords to find what pages on your website.
You may be surprised at the results. People could be using a keyword you had never actually considered before. This might be good information to use to make adjustments to your SEO strategy. As many as 50 million websites use Google Analytics.
Creating Your Own Backlinks
It is true that backlinks, or links pointing back to you on other websites, are factored into Google’s algorithm to help determine search engine rankings. However, you want to obtain backlinks organically from websites that are actually independent from you. Google’s algorithm has been getting increasingly good at spotting fraudulent attempts to acquire backlinks. If you do abuse your acquisition of backlinks, you could be delisted from Google entirely.
Your Content Does Not Match Your Keywords
Google’s algorithm is becoming increasingly sophisticated. One thing Google has been trying to do is penalize websites that advertise content that does not actually exist. Make sure the content you do publish on your websites is relevant to the keywords you deploy in your SEO strategy.
Overall, SEO isn’t necessarily easy. You need to be extremely careful and perhaps even meticulous about how you search engine optimize your website. If you aren’t careful, it may be virtually impossible to find your website on Google, Bing and other major search engines.
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