Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the best tools that you can utilise in your business. A lot of time, effort and resources go into creating an effective SEO strategy, so it can be extremely disheartening and frustrating when your content is not ranking and you are not receiving the organic traffic you had hoped for. SEO is a long game, so you have to be consistent with your efforts to see results. However, you don’t want to be putting too much effort into the wrong actions.
To help you avoid this, here are some of the biggest mistakes that businesses make that you can learn from, and correct in your own business.
#1 Not doing thorough research
Research is important when it comes to creating and implementing an SEO strategy. Research is going to inform all of your actions to ensure you make the right choices. If you fail to conduct thorough research, you are not going to know who your ideal clients are, what they want, what problems need solving, and where you can find them. This will result in poorly informed strategies, that will lead to a lack of visibility, or drive irrelevant traffic to your website.
To avoid this, you should conduct thorough research before creating any strategy or content. You should have a clear understanding of who you are serving and what the purpose of the content is. This will inform your topic and keyword research, and help you to create relevant content that will drive the right customers to your website.
#2 Not having a user-friendly website
Although your website might look nice to you, is it serving your customers? One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is creating a website that suits their tastes, rather than creating one that appeals to their customers.
Your web design should have your customer’s interests and needs at the heart of the design. You should use your research to inform your design and make sure it has relevant messaging, colours, features and call-to-actions that will serve your customers.
Not only should you consider the design of your website, but also the way it functions. Will a new user be able to navigate around the site easily? Will they be able to efficiently find what they want and make a purchase? Can they easily contact you or find more information about you? Are the pages loading quickly?
Think about what you would want from a website that you visit, and ensure you create the best experience for your customers. User experience is a huge part of an SEO strategy. Without it, users are going to bounce off your site and head to your competitors.
#3 Publishing general content
It has been reported that there are over 40 zetabytes of data on the internet. For context, that equates to approximately a trillion gigabytes.
One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is to publish general content on the internet. This is typically a result of trying to focus on the quantity of content they publish, as opposed to the quality.
While a consistent flow of content is beneficial to your SEO strategy, it is no good if it is the same as every other piece on the internet. Not only will this make it harder to rank in the search engine results pages, but it also gives your ideal customers no good reason to click on your content over your competitors. With such a significant number of competing content on the internet, yours will easily get lost in the crowd.
Make sure you put time and effort into every piece of content that you publish. Use your research to inform the content, provide value, and solve a problem for your customers.
SEO is vital for any business that wants to grow. But if it is not being used correctly, then it will not have the desired impact.
