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SEO Mistakes that Will stop you From Achieving Better Results 

Having your own business may allow you to have some flexibility, but it’s hard work. Between managing employees and struggling to attract new customers, you have to make great efforts to enhance your website’s visibility and searchability. If it’s not easily searchable and highly ranked by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it won’t attract traffic that you can convert into customers and leads. There’s nothing more important than search engine optimization when it comes down to growing your brand. It’s a strategy to increase your revenue that you should not be ignoring in 2024.

If you’re starting, pay attention because you can easily commit mistakes. Even the smallest error can hurt your digital marketing campaign and damage your reputation. Please continue reading to find out what SEO mistakes can prevent you from achieving better results.

Not implementing an SEO audit

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If you’re serious about your business, and you are, you’ll want to carry out an SEO audit. This examination is performed for marketing purposes, gives the chance to get a good understanding of your website, individual pages, not to mention overall traffic. It looks at page loading speed, the checkout process, and much more. You’ll be able to identify the website errors that prevent you from moving forward, such as broken links, short meta titles and descriptions, missing internal or external links, content quality, etc.

In simple terms, the SEO audit is helpful in terms of identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and potentials of your website. It matters because algorithms, which retrieve data from search indexes, change all the time. At the beginning of the year, Google released the Snippet Algorithm Update that restricts URLs shown in featured snippets, drawing attention to pages that contain relevant information. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo update their algorithms regularly to deliver the best possible results for a query, so you must be familiar with these changes to strengthen your site.

Applying traditional SEO techniques

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Search engine optimization is continually changing, so if you’d like to boost your rankings, you need to keep up with the changes. Your aim is undoubtedly to rank in the top 10 search engine results. If you want to be the best, it’s necessary to give up on traditional SEO techniques like keyword stuffing. Loading webpages with many keywords and numbers is entirely ineffective. But, it can get you penalized because search engines don’t favor this practice. According to the experts at SEO Inc., the sphere of the virtual world is changing what we know as search engine optimization. It’s no longer acceptable to apply traditional techniques.

Search engines are smarter than ever before, so if you want to stay ahead of the game, resort to modern SEO techniques. For instance, you can optimize your website to be more mobile-friendly. The vast majority of Internet users deploy mobile devices such as phones, tablets, and laptops. They rarely sit at the desk. Perfect viewing on mobile devices will guarantee a higher spot in the SERPs. Google has a preference for mobile sites, and like always, others will follow and join Google. The process of mobile optimization will help you enhance organic traffic. Mobile searches are on the rise, and it’s highly unlikely that this will change any time soon.

Targeting irrelevant keywords

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If you don’t know too much about keyword targeting, you’ll most likely choose keywords that are in high competition. And that is a big mistake because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to rank on these keywords. Relevant advertisers use top competition keywords to drive more sales targeting the ones that give them better opportunities to reach out to people looking for their products or services. You’re better off picking low competition keywords that aren’t used in paid ad campaigns because they have impressive search volume. Use these keywords, whether you’re doing on-page or off-page SEO. It’s recommended to focus on the keywords that enable you to make the most of your bottom line.

According to Toronto experts from SEO Logist, tools help you identify the most relevant keywords for your niche. Google Adwords, for example, enables you to gather data on keyword volumes and trends, keyword competition, etc. Consider using long-tail keywords. Keywords that are generally longer, such as live chat support for a website or compare two-word documents online, don’t get too much traffic, but they do have a higher conversion rate. You can’t predict the conversion rate of a keyword because there is no guarantee a keyword will show up in SERPs. However, you can get an idea about how it will perform by experimenting with PPC ads.

Not adding structured data

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One of the most significant aspects in terms of ranking on top is structured data, which represents a standard format for offering information relating to a page and classifying the page content. It’s practically a code written for search engines. You must use precise and up-to-the-point information to get featured on your web pages. Let’s take an example. If you have a page where you present all sorts of recipes, you have to specify the ingredients, how much time it takes to cook the meals or list the calories of each dish. The structured data is added to the webpage to get a rich snippet.

If you add structured data, you might feature above the search engine results. It’s necessary to implement some markup on the web pages to offer search engines additional information by improving the rich snippets that are displayed right under the page title. Google Search uses structured data to enable particular features and enhancements. Don’t forget to test your structured data during development and keep a close eye on the health of your pages. Maybe you find the terminology confusing. After all, besides expert digital marketers, not everyone understands what RDFa or Schema means. What you need to keep in mind is that you need to combine grammar and vocabulary. Most importantly, get the help of an SEO specialist. Don’t do everything yourself only to find yourself overwhelmed.

About David Montano